At Niepokalanow, we made a decision that shaped everything we built: we would price our publications at cost, or below cost, because the people who most needed the information were the people who could least afford to pay for it.
This was not philanthropy. It was a design principle. A communication system that excludes the people who most need to communicate is not a communication system. It is a privilege system with a technology layer.
The digital divide is the modern version of this exclusion, and it is, I want to argue, not a technical problem but a moral one.
What the Divide Looks Like
The digital divide is usually described in terms of access: who has internet connectivity and who does not. This is the most visible dimension, and it is real. Billions of people lack reliable internet access, and this lack excludes them from education, employment, healthcare, governance, and the basic capacity to participate in the information systems that shape their lives.
But the divide is deeper than access. It includes:
Affordability. In many regions, internet access exists but is too expensive for the majority of the population. The person who has access to a network but cannot afford to use it is, functionally, as disconnected as the person who has no network at all.
Literacy. Access without the knowledge to use it effectively is incomplete access. The person who can connect to the internet but cannot evaluate the information they find, protect their privacy, or navigate the systems that govern their digital life is vulnerable, not empowered.
Representation. The internet is not neutral terrain. The content available, the languages supported, the perspectives represented, and the systems designed all reflect the priorities of the people who built them – who are, overwhelmingly, wealthy, urban, English-speaking, and male. The person from a rural community in a non-dominant language who goes online encounters a system that was not built for them and does not fully include them.
The Moral Dimension
The digital divide is typically framed as a development challenge – a problem to be solved through infrastructure investment and market expansion. This framing is not wrong, but it is incomplete, because it treats connectivity as a commodity rather than as a right.
If information is a commodity, then unequal access is a market outcome – unfortunate but not unjust. If information is a right, then unequal access is a moral failure – a condition that the systems we build are obligated to correct.
I argue for the second framing, and I argue for it on the same grounds that I priced our publications at cost: because the person who cannot access information is the person who most needs it, and a system that excludes them by design is a system that has failed at its most basic purpose.
What Serving Everyone Requires
Serving everyone is harder and less profitable than serving the people who can pay. This is why the market, left to itself, will not close the digital divide. The market serves paying customers. The people on the wrong side of the divide are not paying customers. They are, from the market’s perspective, invisible.
Closing the divide requires intervention: public investment in connectivity infrastructure, particularly in underserved areas. Subsidized access for populations that cannot afford market rates. Digital literacy programs designed for the communities that need them, in the languages they speak. And platform design that includes, rather than excludes, the perspectives and needs of marginalized populations.
These interventions are expensive. They are also necessary, for the same reason that roads to rural communities are necessary even though rural communities generate less economic activity than urban ones: because the purpose of infrastructure is to serve everyone, not to maximize returns.
The Mission
I built a media operation that reached a million people a month. Not because reaching a million people was profitable. Because they were there, and they needed to be reached.
The internet can reach everyone. The question is whether we will build it to reach everyone, or only the people who are profitable to reach.
The digital divide is the answer we are currently giving. And the answer is: the people who cannot pay are not our priority.
This answer is wrong. Change it. Build for everyone. Price for everyone. Design for everyone.
The tools are modern. The mission is eternal. Serve the person in front of you, especially the one the market cannot see.