closing Digital Divide

While reading on topics about digital divide, I can't help but start searching statistics on Internet access again (the book uses world region in its discussion on global divide, where the statistic comes from International Communication Union. However, my understanding about the region *Asia* is that there are huge gaps within Asia itself, so there must be a lot of outliers in Asia...).

In terms of closing digital divide, I think South Korea can provide the most successful story. First of all, S. Korea has the fastest Internet connections with more than 94% of people having high-speed connections. There is an article talks about "Why Internet connections are fastest in South Korea." The article explains why S. Korea has the fastest Internet connections, and mentions several factors: the broadband industry is competitive in S. Korea, its culture places high value on education, it uses open networks and infrustractures to lower the entry barriers for small companies, it has more dense population, and most importantly, a strong government policy to promote the Internet.

Korean government not only created a special agency (Agency for Digital pportunity & Promotion) to promote the Internet usages, but also put a lot of efforts into education. There is another article that discusses how it deals with digital divide: Korea Bridges Digital Divide

I guess S. Korea has proven that as long as the government has a well-planned policy to battle the problem, the first 2 critiques Mark Warschauer made would no longer be issues?