IT’S A WIRED, WIRED WORLD

London has a cafe called Cyberia that sells a cup of cappuccino for $2.35 — and for $2.85 half an hour’s access to the Internet on one of its 10 computers. Waiters there not only pour the coffee but also provide technical expertise for “newbies” who are making their first foray into the Net.

The Japanese call it “maruchimedia” — multimedia — and they plan to connect it to nearly every Japanese home by the year 2010. Their carrier: a nationwide supersophisticated fiber-optic system being encouraged by the Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications. In Hong Kong 600 of the city’s skyscrapers are already wired with fiber optics and rate as “intelligent buildings.” The colony’s 6 million residents are so interconnected that the better restaurants forbid patrons to talk on their cellular telephones while eating.

And in Moscow, browsers at the jampacked Mitino open-air computer market can pick up crateloads of pirated software, state-of-the-art motherboards and warp-speed modems — and then go home to the frustrating task of trying (often without success) to tie them into computer networks using telephone lines that date from Lenin’s day.

Little by little, the world is getting wired. Despite some big bare spots in middle Africa, Mongolia and the real Siberia (as opposed to the Cyberia Cafe), PCs and their attendant modems are knitting together the global village just as Marshall McLuhan predicted. While no country is as well connected as the U.S., with 32 PCs per 100 citizens, Europe and Asia are coming up fast. Among the reasons are the privatization of industry, which is breaking the stranglehold of government telecommunications monopolies, and the recognition by political leaders of the vital importance of getting up to speed on the worldwide Infobahn (as the Europeans prefer to call it).

The global revolution encompasses every instrument of communication, from pagers to cell phones to CD-ROM. The main gauge of change in information delivery is the boom in sales of modems, which are expected to grow at an average rate of 17.2% worldwide (22.4% in Europe alone) between 1994 and 1998, and the expanding reach of the Internet and such commercial operators as CompuServe. “Sales of CD-ROM drives are doubling and tripling this year,” says Deborah Monas, an analyst at London’s Kagan World Media. The next 10 years are expected to bring a boom that will put much of the developed world on a par with the U.S. Monas predicts that as many as 42.5% of Europe’s 153 million TV households will have PCs by 2003 and that 93% of those machines will be equipped with CD-ROM drives. “The U.S. could reach 57% ((home-PC penetration)) by 2003,” she says, “and Britain could catch up to that figure by then. Germany may be even higher.” In Japan, PC penetration is 8.8 per 100 households and growing, while Singapore’s authoritarian leadership has vowed to make that country an “intelligent island” by 2000.

The case of Singapore highlights the fact that the cyberworld is not — and probably never will be — a global village in which everybody speaks the same language and thinks the same thoughts. On the contrary, every country tends to remodel its piece of the network according to its cultural preferences. Even Canada, despite its many commonalities with the U.S. — including its phone system — does things its own way. “Are we any different?” asks David Sutherland, head of computing and communications at Ottawa’s Carleton University. “The answer is typically Canadian: yes and no. Because of our cultural differences, we seem more bent on local activity than on reaching across the country.” In that spirit, Canadians have more local “freenet” connections per capita than their southern cousins — a total of nine community services that provide free local access to the Internet. Canadians also claim a computer culture that is both more open and more self- regulating than in the U.S. “Our philosophy is to permit an open dialogue” with as little policing as possible, says Sutherland. “We have had the odd loony and the occasional inappropriate posting, but over a year and a half we’ve had an amazingly civil environment.”

Like the U.S., Canada is experimenting with two-way data services. Le Groupe Videotron Limitee, a firm based in Montreal, plans to start an experimental system in the city of Chicoutimi, Quebec, that will send and receive electronic mail, regulate thermostats, order pay-per-view movies and get weather reports and stock market quotes. If it works, the plan is to widen it to as many as 1.5 million homes in Montreal and Quebec City. Outside the relatively well-wired confines of North America, however, getting connected can still be a frustrating and costly experience. In Europe and parts of Asia, monopolistic state telephone systems erect a bewildering array of speed limits and tollgates that make traveling the Infobahn a costly and often frustrating experience. High long-distance fees and connection surcharges levied by monopolistic government communications ministries can make the use of the Internet and such services as CompuServe and America Online unduly expensive for ordinary users. Some countries outlaw communications equipment without an official government imprimatur, which can double or even quadruple the prices of such items as modems and two-way telephone jacks.

Even after they get connected, users need access to good-quality telephone lines, which are neither as ubiquitous nor as cheap as in the U.S. Waiting lists for phone connections range from mere weeks in France to years — or never — in the communications-deprived nations of the former Soviet Union.

France is usually cited as the glowing exception to the restrictive European pattern. In the early 1980s, the French government launched Minitel — a small-screen unit with a keyboard that plugs into a normal telephone wall outlet to connect users with a wide variety of information services. Minitel is now a familiar object in many French homes, partly because of its reputation — deserved — as a commercial conduit for suppliers of both hard and soft porn. Despite that sleaze factor, Minitel set the standard during the 1980s as the world’s first truly practical and inexpensive provider of interactive services for a mass market. It was, and is, the VW Beetle of the information age.

But like the beetle, minitel is in danger of becoming outmoded. With monthly Minitel fees rising just as PC prices are starting to plummet, some users are turning to multimedia vehicles that can connect them with the Internet, or to more varied commercial services. France Telecom is struggling mightily to keep its Minitel lead, partly by forming strategic alliances with foreign communications groups (including AT&T, Sony, Motorola and Apple), but the French effort, like others in Europe, is burdened by the weight of the European Union’s burgeoning bureaucracy, which is increasingly inserting barriers across the Continent’s communications throughways.

Europeans recognize that a race is on and that the Americans are winning. At the E.U.’s Corfu summit in June, leaders issued a report warning of encroachments from the outside — i.e., America — and admonishing, “We have to get it right, and get it right now.” So far, there is nothing in Europe or Asia to compare with the American commercial services such as CompuServe, America Online and Prodigy. The most aggressive of them, CompuServe, has set up local — and low-price — nodes in most of Europe’s major cities, offering forums and services in German, French and Dutch. The service is adding new subscribers in German-speaking countries at a rate of 1,500 a week — small by U.S. standards, but significant in a Europe with only a third of America’s PC penetration. Government controls and low consumer consciousness, however, remain bigger problems than access. Most CD-ROM drives are made in Asia, for example, yet two-thirds of installed CD-ROM units are in America. Japan, a nation of superb hardware innovators, is ranked only 18th in the world in terms of PCs — largely because there is not much to connect with in Japan. Japan is also far behind the U.S. in hooking computers together in networks, although that business started to take off in 1994 as fledgling on-line services like Niftyserve, as well as limited access to Internet, enjoyed a huge surge in customers. Japan’s maruchimedia may be the hot topic at electronics-industry gatherings, but the Japanese seem bewildered about what it is.

“They want to be in the multimedia business,” says Roger Mathus, executive director of the U.S. Semiconductor Industry Association in Japan. “But they don’t know how to do it. They thrive on having a model they can improve upon, but they don’t have one yet.”

Instead the Japanese bureaucracy is marshaling its forces for a “multimedia war” — with all the implications of official encouragement that the phrase suggests. The Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications’ (M.P.T.) gargantuan plan to run fiber-optic cable into almost every home by 2010 will cost between $330 billion and $500 billion. Critics warn that it is not only an expensive but probably also an unnecessary weapon, since there are no services — current or expected soon — that would actually employ fiber to the home. A hybrid system of coaxial cable and fiber-optic cable does the job just as well for a fraction of the cost.

Meanwhile, the M.P.T. has not had the success it wished for; its budget request for millions in tax-free loans was sharply trimmed in government budget negotiations, partly because eager high-tech companies need no incentives to push networking and multimedia services. The question is how quickly Japan’s limited tribe of users will log on to state-of-the-art services. As Yukio Noguchi of Hitotsubashi University wrote recently, “I get the feeling we are being asked to build a tremendously lavish swimming pool, even though only a couple of people know how to swim.”

In the former Soviet Union, the reverse is true: lots of enthusiastic swimmers are diving headlong into a few creeks and muddy swimming holes. In the mind of the masses, the computer revolution has long since overtaken the October Revolution as the central reality. At Moscow’s Mitino computer market, crowds of men in fur hats shove through haphazard rows of battered metal kiosks crammed with state-of-the-art software — mostly pirated — as well as modems, accelerator cards, chips, CD-ROMS, drives and every other widget and doohickey known to the computer business. The market is part of a pell-mell private-enterprise rush to catch up after years of communism and the cold war. Until the end of the 1980s, communist regimes strictly controlled communications technology, which they knew could cause their own destruction. And the West placed heavy restrictions on the transfer of technologies that could be used for military purposes. But once Windows 3.1 and its Truetype Cyrillic fonts were introduced in Russia in 1993, the Infobahn was open for business.

The biggest barrier for the former East bloc countries, however, is not language but technology. Telephone connections are so poor that using a modem to log on to a node — even one inside the Moscow city limits — is difficult and frustrating. Still, Russians are in some ways more connectivity-conscious than West Europeans. A system called VNIPAS, a Russian acronym, linked academic and scientific institutions in Eastern Europe as early as 1987, and a successor network is expanding rapidly into commercial markets. Clients include Caterpillar, GE, Computerworld newspaper, the Moscow News and the vast scientific research center of Akademgorokok in Novosibirsk. Other systems geared to more popular markets are beginning to show up. So far, the Russian government has made no effort to regulate cyberspace, and none is expected.

“They can’t regulate the stock market,” says Anatoli Voronov, executive director of a populist, anarchic online service known as GlasNet. “Regulating computers must be far down on the list.” The Russians have got that part right, at least. Indeed, for all the world’s governments, what is apparent today and is likely to be dramatically so in the future is that attempts to control the global flow of electro-information are not only futile but counterproductive as well.