WebProNews

A number of readers here rely on WPW being accurate and making sound statements of facts in articles, so it comes as a surprise that David Utter asserts that: "Even Romania has more high-speed connections as a percentage of population *than the country that invented the Internet in the first place*." I trust that he is not suggesting that the USA 'invented the Internet in the first place', as the UK were aware of the Internet long before the USA even had heard of the term. Most of us in the UK knew the work being carried out by (now) Sir Tim Berners-Lee before he became a Consultant at CERN in Switzerland and eventually to developing the whole concept of the Internet. Prior to becoming a Consultant, he worked at Plessey Telecommunications as a software engineer where he developed and worked on distributed systems, message relays, and bar coding. Subsequently, he developed a multi-tasking operating system, and typesetting software for intelligent printers at D.G. Nash. Having joined CERN in 1980, he developed his first hypertext system which he named Enquire and along the way had brought in Robert Cailliau as a partner in the project. Using the hypertext program which Berners-Lee had taken time out to develop was put on both mens computers and the two men began communicating with each other on December 25, 1990 via the world's first server at info-cern.ch. It is through his endeavours that Berners-Lee managed to persuade CERN to provide a certification on April 30, 1993, that the web technology and program code was in the public domain so that anyone could use it. Berners-Lee currently holds the 3Com Founders Chair, and has served as Director of the W3C Consortium since it was founded and has authorthered a large number of books on related subjects. All this was documented by Robert Cailliau on November 2, 1995 in 'A Short History of the Web', published in Paris.

Comparing USA with 300 million people and 9,629,091 sq/km to Romainia's 237,500 sq/km and 22 million people isn't a fair comparison.

Running cable TV and DSL grade telephone lines to rural America isn't possible. Many places cannot support an analog modem because of the distances and use satellite TV becuase they're not served by the cable companies.

I agree something has to change but your article is comparing apples to oranges.