the Post and
Telecommunication Office (Office des postes et des telecommunications - OPT),
which is the national operator. And things are made even more difficult because
of prohibitive connection costs - three times the cost of a local phone call.

China is also discovering digital information through the China Wide Web, which
is the country's national Internet. The number of its subscribers jumped from
100,000 in 1996 to 600,000 in 1997. Set up by the China Internet Corporation
(CIC), a company based in Hong Kong, the China Wide Web is a business and
information network more or less cut off from the rest of the world, and
screened and controlled by the Chinese authorities.

The abyss between the "info-rich" and the "info-poor" is not only the one
dividing developed and developing countries. In any country, there are gaps
between the rich and the poor, the employed and the unemployed, the people who
belong to society and the people who are rejected by it. As a new communication
medium, the Internet can be a way out of the abyss. Anyone can have an e-mail
address on the Net. Anyone can use the Web in the public library or in the
premises of some association, to find information or look for a job.

2.3. The Web: First English, Then Multilingual

In the beginning, the Web was nearly 100% English, which can be easily explained
by the fact that the Internet was created in the United States as a network set
up by the Pentagon (in 1969) before spreading to US governmental agencies and to
universities. After the creation of the World Wide Web in 1989-90 by Tim
Berners-Lee at the CERN (European Laboratory for Particle Physics), Geneva,
Switzerland, and the distribution of the first browser Mosaic (the ancestor of
Netscape) from November 1993 onwards, the Web, too, began to spread, first in
the US thanks to considerable investments made by the government, then around
North America, and then to the rest of the world.

The fact that there are many more Internet surfers in the US and Canada than in
any other country is due to different factors - these countries are among the
leaders in the latest computing and communication technologies, and hardware and
software, as well as local phone communications, are much cheaper there than in
the rest of the world.

In Hugues Henry's article, La francophonie en quete d'identite sur le Web
(Francophony in search of identity on the Web), published in the Dossiers of the
daily cybermagaz