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  WITH ALL EYES trained on Europe as the next epicenter of the Net revolution -- and with venture capitalists arriving in full force to propel the movement forward -- a study published last week in the Financial Times revealed some sobering stats about our old friends across the Atlantic. Conducted in mid-April, before the markets took a turn for the worse and Boo.com became an international joke, the survey, by opinion research firm MORI, found that only seven percent of people in the United Kingdom want to be part of the Internet industry. And just three percent said they would leave their jobs to pursue their own dot-com dream. While the numbers increased slightly among younger people, they were still dramatic: Twelve percent of people aged fifteen to thirty-four said they wanted to be part of the Net economy, and four percent would leave their jobs if they had a good start-up idea.

The FT survey was startling, encapsulating a psychological profile of an entire country into a few digestible info nuggets. In the U.K., as one American venture capitalist recently put it, "people aren’t going to change just because." A natural tendency toward skepticism and a resistance to hype -- a driving force behind the Net mania in the United States -- combine with conservative notions about class mobility to produce a culture in which entrepreneurialism does not necessarily thrive. When the share price of Lastminute.com, the U.K.'s most famous dot-com success story to date, began to slide after its IPO, Martha Lane Fox, the company’s founder, was widely mocked for having been too big for her britches.

Anecdotal evidence to support the FT conclusions is all over London, which at the moment is experiencing a growing sociological divide -- as striking as that between rich and poor in the U.S. -- between those who "get" the Net and those who don’t. And just as surprising as the fact that the FT numbers remain virtually unchanged among the youngest members of the workforce is the fact that this divide seems, anecdotally at least, to have little to do with education or even income level. At a recent dinner party in a swank bistro in the London neighborhood of Camden, talk turned inevitably to the Internet. It began with a twenty-seven-year-old lawyer, who confessed that she had sent "about three e-mails" in her life, and would have no idea how to conduct research on the Web. "I guess I’m kind of traditional," she said. "I like the idea of reading books in the library." This elicited solid praise from her boyfriend, a television producer and the son of a member of Parliament, who admitted he was opposed to "technology." The conversation continued with a financial journalist for a major national newspaper: "I hate ‘interactivity,’" he said. "I mean, I don’t want to interact. I want to lie on the sofa and have things fed to me!" Even a dinner guest who worked for a software company confessed he was fairly clueless about the Internet, and not particularly impressed by its potential.

While this could be written off as an isolated occurrence, the findings of the FT survey lend it a greater degree of validity as a telling example. Try to imagine a similar situation in the U.S., and it becomes absurd: A group of extremely well-educated, intellectually curious, financially secure, and media savvy twentysomethings who have no interest at all in the power of the Internet as a tool for communication, commerce, or even entertainment.

Elsewhere around London, signs of widespread excitement and enthusiasm about the Net can prove misleading. The ubiquity of cell phones, for example, is not evidence of a similar penetration of technology overall. Due to historically high rates for local phone calls, mobile phone technology was an overwhelming success. But those same rates for phone service -- charged per minute -- also apply to Internet access; combined with higher prices on PCs (up to fifty percent more than in the U.S., according to some estimates), this has led to a much lower number of households with Net connections. Likewise, the crowded terminals at Easy Everything -- an inexpensive Internet access outlet that’s cropping up like Starbucks on every corner of central London, often with every terminal occupied -- do not indicate a population enthralled with all things Web. Easy Everything, which offers computer usage for £1 (roughly $1.60) an hour, is packed primarily with Londoners, for whom it is their sole source of access to the Net. (Compare this with Internet cafes in the U.S., which are used largely by tourists and professionals on the road.)

Still, despite the seemingly unwelcome climate, venture capitalists -- particularly Americans -- continue to set up funds in the U.K., and the dot-com industry pushes forward, despite the collapse of Boo.com and a media site, netimperative.com, last week. And perhaps the more conservative environment will give birth to a Net marketplace that’s less inflated, more realistic and sustainable, than that of the U.S. In the meantime, there are scores of dot-coms looking to staff their operations, and it appears there may not be too many applicants among the British population. Work abroad, anyone?

Hillary Rosner is a Technology Editor at FEED.

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