Studying the Diversity in the Registration of Domain names .it among individuals: generational and gender Digital Divide

We studied the existence and the persistence of the digital divide and investigated the determinants of Internet diffusion among Italian provinces. The original aspects of our research are: i) The creation of new reliable indicators to measure the Digital Divide and the diffusion of the Internet in Italy (due to the impossibility of calculating the exact number of Internet users, we used as an indicator the number of domain names in the ccTLD ".it"). ii) Description of the heterogeneity of the diffusion of the Internet within a country and not only among different countries. Results show that a "social digital divide" exists, both in terms of geographical distribution (i.e., in macro-areas - Northern, Central, and Southern Italy - and at the provincial level) and among natural persons.