Like it or not, whether the Republic ever becomes a global centre for electronic commerce has little to do directly with you.
That is, unless you are a big ecommerce player - perhaps you have a company that would run its online operations here, or you control one of the businesses that could help create the massive infrastructure needed for such a project. But if you just have a smallish business that might do some business online, the truth is that you're not particularly relevant.
Does that annoy you? Then here's more to prick the ego: at the very bottom of the relevancy league come home users. Some observers have argued that the State will never become an e-commerce hub because they, personally, do not have access yet to some of the high-speed Internet connection alternatives, like cable modems or ADSL (asymmetric digital subscriber line, a way of greatly accelerating Net connections using plain old telephone lines) and don't get free local telephone calls, allowing them to stay online all day.
Let's take a little reality check here. There are about 3.5 million people living in the State. Internet industry authorities - at least, the ones who aren't always trying to over inflate this figure because, as digital-age service providers or pundits, it's to their benefit to do so - estimate that there are perhaps 200,000 of them, at best, who are now regular users of the Net (as opposed to people who might have gone online a few times).
Perhaps, say the most optimistic estimates, around a million Irish people will be regular Net users in the next few years.
Let's put that number in context. The total number of people living in the Republic equals only a fourth of the people who inhabit the San Francisco Bay Area, or a little more than a third of the people living in London. Even if the Republic's entire population went online, the total would not come close to the number of people in the San Francisco area who already are online.
A million Irish people online is a drop in the e-commerce bucket. Even if all those people immediately start buying and selling online, they simply aren't a very important market in global e-commerce terms. Thus, whether you and a million others in the State are online is not a particularly important consideration to a company likely to be attracted to a global hub location. In other words, the online auction site eBay or bookseller Amazon would not locate in the State because the Irish market is - or more likely, isn't - seen as a lucrative one.
They would locate here because of a combination of tax incentives, infrastructure, employee availability, and start-up grants. Yes, that's right - for all the reasons so many technology companies already locate here. Did Microsoft come here because it thought Dubliners would snap up the software products it localises here? Is Oracle here because it believed a million Irish people were longing for its database products?
Of course not. Such firms are here because the Republic has proved to be a cost-effective, strategic location for a number of activities. That the Republic is the second-largest software exporter in the world underlines this point - the Irish market per se had nothing to do with their decision to set up Irish operations.
Indeed, the reverse is true - the Government is so intent on encouraging such companies to locate here because they are good for the Irish market. The companies and the people who work for them buy things. Just ask Leixlip, with its thousands of Intel workers, what having a company of that size in the vicinity does for the local economy.
If technology companies had searched for locations where the population was particularly tech-literate - if that was an important consideration when they sought to set up international operations - they certainly would never have come here. The Republic has an extremely (some would argue, shamefully) low level of computers in homes, of computers in schools, of Internet usage compared to other states.
The same is true of Singapore, with its sharp divide between the haves and have-nots. Singapore, long an East Asian business powerhouse, is itself vying very successfully to become an ecommerce hub. But the masses there are far too poor to care whether they have Net access, much less high-speed, cheap Net access, and that hasn't deterred companies from locating there.
At the other end of the scale is the US, which is constantly cited as the land of blisteringly fast home Net access. But the reality is that most people use plain old modems and plain old phone lines to connect to the Internet. ADSL is available in very few, mostly urban, locations. Hardly any cities offer cable access. Of course, local calls are free (although users still have to pay a monthly flat rate for the phone line, probably a second line if they use the Net to any great extent). But the vast majority of Americans do not use, much less have the option of using, the faster Net options.
What is undeniable is that, because Americans had cheap, general access to the Net, and because there are so many of them, they quickly went online and became a massive potential e-commerce market. The young e-commerce industry has grown up around the fact of that huge, solid market. The possibility of e-commerce will in turn pull newcomers into the market, both businesses and users, especially in places like the Republic where not very many are online.
As more Irish people go online, an Irish e-commerce market will develop here in its own right - with new opportunities for Irish business. The Republic then will become part of the larger, global market as well. If the State can remake itself into an e-commerce hub, incredible opportunities will open up for Irish companies to service the global players locating here and to play into the global market themselves.
And all of this will help create an environment in which the positive social and political aspects of a digital economy can develop. That benefits everybody. But let's not misunderstand all the pieces in this puzzle and the way in which they properly fit together.
Karlin Lillington is at klillington@irish-times.ie
