Access to social support has become more important as the technology has penetrated new sec-tors of the population. Anecdotal evidence suggests that early Web users were embedded in dense
DiMaggio and Hargittai: Digital Inequality ---12---
By contrast, we believe that access to and use of the Internet is continually transformed by the interactions of corporations’ strategic choices, individual users’ responses to these choices, pro-grammers’ decisions about code (Lessig 1999), and government regulation (including intellectual-property legislation, privacy rulings, antitrust actions, and economic regulation). Corporate strategies, as modified by government regulation and consumer response, must be taken into systematic account because they continually alter individual-level incentives and constraints that produce inequality of access to the technology (Neuman, McKnight, & Solomon 1998).