Not so long ago, the future looked like this: The spread of computer networking would lead to a global village, where people would share a common culture, information would be free and everyone would be an information-have. The Net would pull everyone together, and erase the imbalances between rich and poor, First World and Third, North and South. On the Net, no one knows if you're Hungarian or African, whether you wear sandals or Guccis, drive a Porsche or ride a camel.

Needless to say, that hasn't happened. That earlier vision was colored more by satellite television wrapping the planet in CNN and MTV than by the two-way interactivity of the Internet. The Net reflects local culture and is built on active participation by people everywhere; it doesn't simply beam the same stuff impartially all over the world. It offers the same thing to everyone, everywhere -- those who are connected, anyway. But then it's up to individuals to make use of it. And that's where the gaps are still great.

Of course, amazing stories abound. American inner-city kids who get onto the Net and out of the ghetto -- or stick around and use it to make things better. And there are my friends in Central Europe and Russia, who arrange programming gigs by e-mail and start up Web sites with no capital.

But you can't just give people access to information and expect to change anything meaningfully. The industrial-age equivalent would be distributing machinery with no source of power. Education is the crucial ingredient to actually using the Net's free content and redistributed knowledge. And spreading learning around is far more difficult -- not to mention, expensive -- than simply wiring schools. Especially in places that are poor and poorly educated -- most of Africa, for instance, a continent with fewer Net connections than many U.S. cities.

Eastern Europeans, by contrast, are by and large well-educated. They may be disadvantaged by geography, by recent history and by the chaotic surrounding culture But once they manage to fight their way onto the Net they can hold their own. Formidable barriers remain -- language, infrastructure, even the modest capital needed to operate online. Even so, it's easier to join the information economy from Moscow than, from, say, a disadvantaged home in Appalachia. Let alone a tin-roofed shack on the outskirts of Lima.

But especially for people long cut off from mainstream global culture, the attraction is overwhelming. Those of us in the West can easily forget how magical this system is. In North America or Western Europe, there are many way to get whatever information you want, with or without the Internet. But in Tashkent or Tallin or even Moscow itself, the Net may be literally the only source. And things like slow access or bad connections are a minor inconvenience compared with waiting weeks or months for a book or precious document -- or simply not being able to get some crucial piece of information at all.

I started using e-mail in 1989, not to communicate with other leading-edge people in the United States -- I could get them easily enough by telephone -- but to exchange messages with programmers and budding businessmen I had met in Russia. I remember when a man called Leo Tomberg in Estonia established the first connection between Russia's then-UUCP network and the Internet, via a gateway in Finland. It was like a hole in a dike, and information rushed through... in both directions.

Today that same pent-up desire describes millions of people living on the margins of global civilization, and yearning to be a part of the bigger world. The Internet is a ladder that can get them there -- but only for those who can figure out how to climb.

Esther Dyson, who chairs the Electronic Frontier Foundation, is the president of EDventure Holdings, and co-founder of Poland Online.