Bridge to Asia: Book and Journal Donation Program

We have developed several proposals for new applications of information technology - some implemented, some at the concept stage - to help China and other countries gain greater access to knowledge in the West:

Information Transfer Stations
China TeleHealth Service
Knowledge Ports
European Knowledge Commons
Science and Engineering Education Project
Core Library Project.

Such applications will not invent themselves. The trends are away from public access toward privatization of networks and content, and the Internet alone, which can transport data around the world at high speed and low cost, cannot overcome the price barriers of the First World knowledge industry.

Developed countries will continue to own most of the world’s formal knowledge, charging high fees for access to it, while developing countries will own little. If the Internet spreads to every village in the world, this maldistribution will not change without progressive, even radical reforms in intellectual property regimes.

The solution is moral, not technological. Until essential knowledge is treated as a public good rather than a commodity, and access becomes affordable, China and other countries will continue to fall behind, and the Internet will continue to increase rather than decrease the knowledge gap.

The ideal solution and best hope for China or Vietnam, is to build a knowledge base inside the country - an open collection of essential materials in paper and digital forms, indigenous and imported from the West.

The knowledge industry should be pressed to help accomplish that - it should release contents that are critical to modernization, release them to Third World users for free or at affordable cost - as the pharmaceutical industry was pressed to release AIDS drugs.

The professions should join the effort. The profession of law, through its international bodies, should insist that students and practitioners in developing countries have equal access to core legal knowledge. First World physicians should insist that their Third World colleagues have basic libraries in health sciences, and so on, through architecture, economics, engineering and more.

If essential human learning were liberated from private control, the Internet might realize its potential for providing universal access to knowledge. Until that happens - and it is unlikely that it will - developing countries may never be self-sufficient in what they need to know.

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