ICTs and Territorial Competitiveness in the Era of Internet

At the beginning of the third millennium, we are witnessing a renewal of the interest in ICTs as weapons of regional competitiveness, built around the Internet phenomenon and the consequent emergence of the ‘‘New Economy’’. The main aim of this paper is to present some reasons and counter-arguments to the general optimistic belief on the role ICTs play nowadays on regional competitiveness and on adjustment processes of regional disparities. Our main impression is that even in the era of Internet the achievement of regional competitiveness via new ICTs remains a difficult process, fraught with many obstacles and bottlenecks which in the long run risk to exacerbate territorial inequalities. While old adoption bottlenecks of the eighties have been overcome, new and more subtle adoption barriers have emerged in the era of Internet, which will be presented in-depth in the present work and their territorial impact highlighted.