Throughout the past decades, the prevailing international policies on transfer of technology have erected formidable obstacles to the reduction of North-South gaps. When energy and telecom infrastructures are in place, there are still the costs of actual usage of ICTs to address. In order to meet these expenses, taxation and subsidization strategies are needed that allow individuals and institutions to access digital networks. The effective operation of ICTs also requires a whole range of skills and adequate mechanisms for training in these skills. Technical skills are needed for the maintenance of hardware, the modification of software and the manufacture of electronic goods.
Managerial skills are essential to the operation of networks, information systems and databases.
And, of course, information skills are crucial to the processing of all the information made available through the ICTs. This needs planning and funding of extensive educational programmes. It also needs to be realised that national efforts to attain the digital benefits are part of a global environment. The bottom line of this system proposes that the deployment of ICTs should predominantly, if not totally, be a matter of market relations. Global policy making addresses primarily the removal of all obstacles that might stand in the way of the unhindered operation of the major ICT investors on markets around the world.