Woops: The digital divide may be the ability to pay

The New York Times has an article today that points out a problem raised by the penetration of the Internet into poor countries. The economics of the Internet in rich countries has been largely based on providing free information to users and paying the costs by charging advertisers to send ads along with the requested information. The folk in poor countries are increasingly using bandwidth intensive services such as streaming video and streaming audio, services that require more server hardware and more transmission capacity. On the other hand, they are not an attractive market for advertisers. So the costs are growing faster than the income.