Reported in the Washington Post

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/business/daily/oct99/wired17.htm

Scarborough Research of New York, a service of the Arbitron Co., surveyed 170,000 adults in 64 major markets from February 1998 to February 1999. The researchers found it to be especially significant that five areas were at or above the halfway mark, meaning Internet use has entered the mainstream of society there.

The study found that 59.9 percent of Washington area adults were online. The San Francisco area, which includes the tech hot spot Silicon Valley, was next at 56.1 percent, followed by Austin, with 55.5 percent; Seattle, at 53.3 percent; and Salt Lake City, at 50 percent.

While Washington DC generated the highest percentage of Internet connectivity, it also showed the greatest division between an affluent wired majority and a poor isolated minority.

The question then becomes: is Internet access going to become the new enforcer of class separation? As commerce and industry continue to move towards using the Internet as their medium of choice, will we see bandwidth disparages become the new moat that surrounds the castle of wealth, with Virtual Private Networks as the inner wall surrounding the plutocracy of multinational corporations? Or am I just paranoid?