Notes

1. INTRODUCTION
The use of the internet for many is a commodity that is hard to live without, serving as a source for entertainment, knowledge and or as source for a profession, with many jobs now requiring at minimum basic knowledge on how to use electronics its often overlooked how many people around the world go without internet or even general access to electronics. This issue is known as the digital divide, which as defined by Muller and De Vasconcelos Aguiar (2023), is the "gap between those with Internet access and those without it" and goes on to split the direct problems of the divide into 5 different issues those being: Availability, Affordability, Quality of service, Relevance, and Additional divides in no particular order. This paper intends to show how by taking advantage of the resources and strengths of both private companies and nonprofits, we can bridge and mitigate the digital divide and ensure not only internet access but technology to a larger fraction of the population.

This paper is organized as follows; Section 2 presents why a society with technology should care as well to alleviate availability issue, Section 3 discusses affordability and quality of service issues, Section 4 the Relevance and issues of possible additional divides, then finally section 5 presents conclusions.

2. THE COST OF INACTION AND THE ISSUE OF AVAILABILITY
There are many reason societies who have had technology since its existence should care about those who have not for example the problems of disinformation and potential. Disinformation comes in many forms but is generally defined as misinterpreting or not stating facts to gain some sort of leverage, this is used by deliberately by some countries such as China, North Korea, Iran etc. to manipulate their citizens into believing certain things in line with their government usually against another. North Korea specifically uses disinformation and creating a digital divide by taking away most technology which can access the internet, except a few which are heavily surveilled and censored, according to Burgess (2023) "The report reveals a days-long approval process to gain internet access, after which monitors sit next to people while they browse and approve their activities every five minutes. For millions of people in North Korea, the internet simply does not exist." While North Korea is most likely the most well-known case of this, it can be assured that other smaller countries have this sort of rule, seeing as how access to the technology would be hard to acquire in the first place. The use of radios and newspaper for information is the most popular with less technological societies and altering the information to flame certain other countries would be detrimental to taking over, this strategy was used specifically by North Korea as well, to fool their citizens into believing there was still a war against the United States, to make citizens distrustful. If a dictator were to take over a country and use these strategies to make citizens so hateful who is to say what may occur as a result. On the other hand, the potential aspect of someone who can create and invent is also taken away with the lack of information available to societies without access to the internet. It is simply not possible for someone without access to a computer to create the next big app, same should go with information for a new creation, robots and computers are the future, and we will need brilliant and creative minds to help us create them and without knowing a great mind may go untapped due to this divide. Theres also technology that can be used to save lives and create jobs which to any society would help out in not only allowing more revenue for the people but their government, and medicines to be produced locally and if advanced enough would help lower some of the prices.

2.1 Availability and Space X
As mentioned in the previous article by Muller and De Vasconcelos Aguiar there exists an issue of availability, to provide for a society that cannot afford and does not have internet must be made, thankfully a solution to the internet availability problem is already underway with the efforts provided by the private company Space X with their “Starlink” satellites, which maintains to “provide low-cost internet to remote locations” according to Pultarova et al. (2024), while they are low cost, they are not entirely free however it is definitely a start, with one source of internet a library of computers can be powered and with this a snowball of information gathering, building more of these satellites would serve as a start however more fiber cables would be welcome as, creating more affordable technologies to use this internet is would still be a problem however with the growing amount of e waste and lowering price of out of date computer parts, with the right distribution and assembly methods nonprofits or even companies can help in provide a fix.

3. AFFORDABILITY AND QUALITY OF SERVICE ISSUES



5. Conclusion



[1] Muller, C., & De Vasconcelos Aguiar, J. P. (2023, August 31). What is the digital divide? - internet society. Internet Society. https://www.internetsociety.org/blog/2022/03/what-is-the-digital-divide/#:~:text=There%20is%20no%20one%20digital,affordability%2C%20quality%2C%20and%20relevance

[2] Burgess, M. (2023, June 8). The bizarre reality of getting online in North Korea. WIRED. https://www.wired.com/story/internet-reality-north-korea/

[3] Pultarova, T., Howell, E., Mann, A., & Dobrijevic, D. (2024, July 1). Starlink satellites: Facts, tracking and impact on astronomy. Space.com. https://www.space.com/spacex-starlink-satellites.html