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Ricardo Garcia Fuentes, owner of Limon y Café, a cybercafe in the Galapagos Islands, said he and several partners paid about $50,000 to set up satellite Internet access in Puerto Ayora, 600 miles from the mainland. Mr. Fuentes said government officials, primarily from Conatel, the phone company, demanded an additional $300,000 in "startup fees," which he and his partners painstakingly gathered or borrowed from investors, including some in the United States.

He said it did not matter whether the fees were required tariffs or flagrant bribes; he had to pay them to open his business.

"We are out here on the vanguard of technology," Mr. Fuentes said in his bar, a tourist haunt with tiki lights and salsa tunes. "But the government makes it too costly. They try to give us a solution but it creates an even bigger headache. There is already too much bureaucracy in this country."

What fees the $300,000 represented and where the money wound up is unclear. Several Internet service providers here reported having paid officials similar fees. But the connectivity commission says it neither receives nor solicits payments from prospective Internet service providers, and Mr. Pileggi, the president of Conatel, insisted that no one had to bribe a government official to become a provider.

In any case, some say corruption may be eroding the commission's fundamental source of revenue - a tax on phone companies' revenues - because many officials believe executives understate revenue to minimize corporate taxes.

Whatever the integrity of the system, the cost of access is daunting. Mario Ortíz, a Conatel executive in charge of infrastructure, estimated that providing universal Internet access - including lines to vast tracts of the Amazon jungle - would be at least $1.9 billion. That is more than one-third of Ecuador's $5.1 billion annual budget.

Mr. Ortíz is considering the costs and benefits of connections other than land lines, including spread spectrum, a method developed by the United States military that spreads a narrow-band signal over a broader portion of the radio frequency band. But because of security concerns, he does not want spread spectrum in urban areas.

In the meantime, Mr. Cooper, in his way, bridges the divide. In addition to selling items on eBay, he takes custom orders when clients want a statue of a specific saint or a rug of particular dimensions. He sees himself as a New Economy intermediary, a man who connects the haves and have-nots of cyberspace.

"The Indians are very happy to sell me tapestries for $10, even when they know I will turn around and sell them for three times as much," Mr. Cooper said as he packed alpaca rugs, wooden statues and glass-framed Amazon insect collections into his sport-utility vehicle. "These people don't have computers and have never heard of e-commerce." So they are glad to have the $10, he said. For now, at least.