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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.