The Internet has not yet begun to fight. To fight, that is, against poverty and ignorance abroad, as well as against terrorism and poor performance at home.

Can one technology do all that? Sure it can, if it's allowed to. But lack of vision internationally, and petty anti-competitive corporate behavior here in this nation, could stymie that potential.

The digital visionaries were right a decade ago when they said that telephones, television and computers would one day merge into one machine, networked into a fast-flowing data stream. That day hasn't arrived yet, because it takes lots of money and political will to build the machinery and the "broadband" -- the digital pipelines needed to carry data at 50 or 1,000 times the volume of an ordinary phone conversation -- for the benefit of everyone. And so far at least Americans, smug about their economy as well as their safety, have beencontent to putter along on the information superhighway.

But the events beginning on Sept. 11 have changed all that, or at least they should have. Put simply, an interconnected broadbanded world would be better for the poor, harder on our enemies and safer for us.

Consider, for starters, the situation in Afghanistan. Taliban authority has collapsed, and yet the conditions that enabled those medievalist reactionaries to take power, including the near-total education monopoly of Islamic fundamentalists, still prevail. Yes, TV sets and movie theaters have reappeared. But, if these Westernizing gains are to be made permanent, a new infrastructure of information will have to be put in place. Today, the United Nations is unveiling an Information and Communication Technologies Task Force aimed, it declares, at bringing "new, creative and quick-acting means to spread the benefits of the digital revolution -- from which four billion of the world's people are currently excluded."

Here's a creative and quick idea: Park a satellite over Afghanistan that beams down approved educational and entertainment content to the 11 million Afghanis between the ages of 6 and 18. Skipping past the need to build classrooms and hire thousands of trustworthy teachers, this local-language material could be beamed into a handheld device -- a yet-to-be-developed but easily envisioned fusion of a pager, a handheld video game and a personal digital assistant -- that would hook young Muslim minds on something other than fundamentalism. How much would it cost? As a beginning point of comparison, a Game Boy Color Console in atomic purple costs $69.99 at Amazon.com, although volume discounts are probably available.

But wait a second: If we're going to offer such nifty digitalism to Afghans, shouldn't we give it to Americans, too? Sure we should. A broadband nation -- in which the Internet is as easy to use as a telephone or a television -- would allow every one of us to participate in civil defense, as well as allow every student to receive a choice of educational content. And most or all of this broadbanding could be achieved through the workings of the free market -- if that market were freed up.

The biggest single obstacle to broadband here in the United States has been the mini-monopolies maintained by the so-called "Baby Bells" -- Verizon, Bell South, Qwest, and SBC -- the four legatees of the old Ma Bell monopoly that was broken up in 1984. In theory, they don't object to broadband, but in practice they don't want to be bothered, because they are making plenty of money operating narrowband.

Ironically, not only are the American people the losers, but it's in their name that the Bells are stifling progress. Proving yet again that patriotism is the last refuge of monopolists, Charles Lee, chairman of Verizon, told The Boston Globe that the lesson of Sept. 11 was that his company should be insulated from competition. And another Verizon executive, Ivan Seidenberg, said that shooing broadbanding competitors away was a matter of national security.

The truth, of course, is the exact opposite: American security and well-being depends on the country's being networked as fully and quickly as possible. In the past, these imperatives have proved too subtle to rouse the broad public interest, and narrow special interests have prevailed. But, in the wake of a war, the free flow of modernizing information is in the national and international interest. And technology can make a dramatic difference in dramatically different cultures.