Before there was the digital divide there was the analog divide – and universal service was the attempt to close that analog divide. Universal service is becoming ever more complex in terms of regulatory design as it becomes the digital divide. In order to evaluate the promise of the next generation Internet with respect to the digital divide this work looks backwards as well as forwards in time. By evaluating why previous universal service mechanisms failed and succeeded this work identifies specific characteristics of communications systems – in particular in billing and managing uncertainty – and argues that these characteristics underlie success or failure in terms of technological ubiquity. Developing a set of characteristics of services rather than a set of services is a fundamental break with the tradition of universal service. In fact, the implications of our proposal is that basic characteristics in the offering of the service rather than the absolute price are critical to close the digital divide: certainty of total charge, ability to avoid deposits or disconnection via best effort service, and payer-based control of all charges. While all of these principles sound obvious in fact none of these hold in the telephony network. Universal service has evolved from common carriage (serve all with no discrimination) to a right to basic services (100% penetration). Universal service is now discussed as the digital divide, as the access to information as opposed to services becomes increasingly critical. However, we are discussing in this paper access to the bits and the network rather than access to the information (or intellectual property) once connected. The provision of universal service is seen as a technical problem only in that the technology costs money – universal service debates have long been the domain of economists. Yet the design of protocols has been the domain of engineers, the building of systems the corporate domain, and the discussion of equity the interest of ethicists. The design of protocols can define the parameters of the corporate decision-makers, the variables of the economist, and the questions for the ethicist. The design decisions made at the fundamental levels can make communications equity more or less likely. In this work I focus on the design of protocols for the next generation Internet, protocols which will fundamentally change the best-effort nature of Internet services. Building on the economic and ethnographic work of others I argue that the effects of protocols adoption on universal service can be predicted to some degree. By examination of past and current technologies I examine a set of technical mechanisms to determine how such mechanisms might harm or enhance universal service. I define each mechanism (e.g. denial of entry) and offer observations about each particular mechanism's implicit pricing assumptions. I close with a discussion of interest to ethicists and regulators on evaluating communications protocols with respect to universal access. Protocols for developing multiple qualities of service for packet-switched networks have focused on economic efficiency (e.g. Mackie-Mason, 1995s Choi, Stahl & Winston, 1997s Shapiro & Varian, 1998), billing to encourage widespread adoption of network innovations (e.g. Xie & Sirbu, 1985) and billing in a manner consistent with the underlying network (e.g. Clark, 1996). Here we examine a set of protocols which include varying quality of service mechanisms with respect to the compatibility of the protocols with universal access.