The Internet is extolled in the West for leveling the playing field between the First and the Third Worlds. But much like the vast bureaucratic maze created to facilitate communications under the British Raj, cyberspace in South Asia is mutating from global village into imperial empire. PNS correspondent Andrew Robinson, a freelance writer based in South Asia, is author of a new book of short stories to be published by HarperCollins.

VISAKHAPATNAM, INDIA-- Internet users in the West extol cyberspace for its free and egalitarian qualities. But in South Asia, cyberspace is showing its more pernicious side -- elitist, undemocratic and as imperially expansionist as any empire in history.

In India, the recent growth of communications technology has been sparked by the desire of Western software firms to employ Indians at low wages without having to relocate their operations. Yet countless news reports hail it as proof of the country's new technological prowess. Bangalore, with its abundance of computer engineers contracted to foreign firms, is dubbed the new Silicon Valley. The proliferation of Internet servers, private email providers, computer magazines, and training institutes is cited as proof of India's "giant leap" toward economic liberalization and modernization.

"The Internet has the potential to level the playing field between First and Third Worlds," enthuses Sanjay Uppal, an information technology professional who works in the U.S. and India, "as access to vital information becomes open to all."

But Uppal's idea of "open to all" is becoming more problematic by the day.

Much like the British Raj, which once installed a vast bureaucratic system in the name of facilitating communications throughout the empire, so the Internet as global village is mutating into the Internet of imperial empire. If Indians once had to translate simple requests into complex bureaucratese in order to participate in the spoils of the Raj, today they face increasingly cumbersome and costly computer obstacles to access the economic and cultural privileges of cyberspace.

The most obvious hurdle -- as during the Raj -- is language. Because the Internet can only handle Romanic script in ASCII text, Internet users must read and type in English. Not only does this requirement weed out the majority of South Asians (while English is spoken widely, it remains a language of the upper class), it also interferes with efforts to develop computer technologies in indigenous languages.

"I always dreamed of starting a Bangla language computer network," says Nawab Kabir, system operator of the largest computer BBS and Internet email service in Bangladesh. "The problem is that everyone hears all this hype about the Internet and the rush to provide Internet email access is very competitive. There's no financial support or time for developing local networks."

"Local BBS-style networks just aren't sexy enough," agrees Eric Ruston, who examines computer communications issues in Africa for the Ford Foundation. "Everyone wants to surf the Web."

The Internet itself was a product of massive U.S. government spending. But today, most Third World governments lack both the communications infrastructure and the money to develop their own networks. The distant outposts of Third World cyberspace can be connected only through expensive long distance phone calls.

The result is that just as all roads once led to Rome, all the electronic modem-links of the developing world's slowly expanding infobahn now lead to the Internet. And 90 percent of the Internet, according to Toolnet, a Netherlands-based nonprofit specializing in technology transfer, exists in North America, Europe and Australia.

In this city of Visakhapatnam, a medium-sized city of 900,000, two private email services compete for customers. Both send their mail via long distance telephone call to a government controlled Internet server in Bombay, where subscription costs are over $500 per year (versus $30 in the U.S.). If email users living across town wish to communicate between the networks, they must send their email over the Internet -- bouncing the message around the world -- and pay more than ten times what they would pay for local email (40 cents per kilobyte versus 3 cents).

As during colonial times, so in the cyberspace era conducting business between Visakhapatnam and New York is faster and more economical than conducting business between Visakhapatnam and a smaller town like Vijayawada (pop. 400,000) just 120 miles away.

At the village level, meanwhile, where some 80 percent of the 1.2 billion South Asians live, the Internet remains as remote and unfathomable a concept as other empires of antiquity must have been. Even for the enterprising villager who learns how to type in English and earns enough money to afford the expensive computer class, the exorbitant Internet subscription fee and the long distance telephone call to an Internet server in Bombay or Dhaka or Karachi, Internet access will never be like "surfing."

"Having an Internet server doesn't guarantee fast communications," says Jeron Jonk of Toolnet. "Egypt has one Internet link for the entire country. The link was so overloaded that when I was in Cairo, I had to wait a couple of minutes for every keystroke to travel out of the country and bounce back to me."

Perhaps the most prescient view of the future of cyberspace in the developing world comes from a peek inside a typical government office here where enormous desks are covered with towering stacks of unfinished documentation, a dozen paperweights and a thousand and one official stamps. It's the bureaucratic legacy of an imperial system once promoted as equitable and open to all and capable of one day linking the entire world.