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The Internet is America-centric, But for How Long
joshamania writes "There's an article on Yahoo entitled "Why the Net doesn't belong to America." The article references some good examples of "side-stepping" government regulation on the Internet. " This is gonna become much more important in upcoming years. What will it mean, and how will it affect all of us?
What do will it mean, and how will it effect all of us?
It do will mean we all do will stop do speaking English. Just like you do did demonstrate.
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The information infrastructure of the European countries is far better developed than in most regions of the US. The major cities in US have great cable, but in Europe, 90% of the population, no matter where they live, will be able to connect through an xDSL connection within 1-2 years.
In my country, Denmark, all telephone centrals are digital, but I think only about 40% of US' telephone centrals are the same.
Anders Ebbesen
A quick thought....
Because an American invented the telephone, does that mean that we own the telephones in England? Do we own all the world's radios? The software (that Americans, you say, made) that runs the internet was _purchased_. The infrastructure of the internet in other countries is not owned by the US. The ideas behind it may have originated in the US, but the US in no way owns the internet, any more than we own telephone communication.
And you say that the US produces 99% of the hardware running the internet. This is completely untrue. I challenge you to find even one part of the computer you're sitting in front of that was made in the US.
So there.
Jim
Right now some countries are complaining about how english-centric the web is. We will be seeing more of spanish ( http://www.Quepasa.com ), Chinese, Japenese, German ( http://www.suse.de ), and the like.
Maybe this will provide the stimulis that the Europeans have on learning more than one language. With them is has always been the proximity of the different countries and lanquages. Now it is being brought right to our computer screen.
While various counties cooperating across international boundaries sounds like a good concept, this is a fairly rudimentary analysis of the problem. Just as regional variations of public decency exist in the US they exist in even greater abundance across the globe. Are the standards that apply in San Francisco going to fly in China?? Most likely not. Porn is only the tip of this iceburg. The prevalance of filtering software compounds this problem. (Latin = cum for example.) The solution is not as simple as saying everyone play nice.
The US doesn't "own" the net as a whole, but US corporations own whopping big portions of it. And as long as that is the case, the net will be pretty US-Centric. And with inertia being what it is, this is not likely to change. Today, "getting on the net" in any kind of global manner means conforming to the current net culture. And current net culture is pretty damn US-centric, with some European culture thrown in for spice.
We probably will see some more "local" subsets of the internet based on local languages. But I suspect that most of these will remain just that, local subsets, while the main streets of the internet will remain pretty much like they are now.
Really, this is only one little piece of the cultural changes that are going on in the world. As the world shrinks, cultures get jammed together. And as they get jammed together, they tend to borrow from and/or absorb each other. This is really what the "Invasive American Culture" really is. And it isn't just a matter American culture swamping others. American culture itself is aquiring foreign elements. As "The Economist" noted last year, the two hot things among the eight-year-old set were a Japanese cartoon and a British book.
The cake is a pie
Jurisdictions will then have to compete to provide the level of protection that consumers actually want for their transactions and that the businesses want from lawsuits. The jurisdictions that can come up with the right amount of protection for the right price will attract the businesses. And businesses can actually set up servers in multiple locations and allow customers to select the level of legal protection they want.
The net will not be what we demand, but what we make it. Build it well.
Denmark is a tiny speck. When you can say that all of Europe is all digital (much more comparable to size/pop of US), then your stetement will mean something. Also, we had phone switches installed decades before much of EU, whil you guys were still doing IP over yodeling for long distance comm.
It looks so because most sites from other countries that are non english are ignored. Ignored in search engines, ignored by readers. Another problem is domain naming. Most US based people believe that every site has to have a .com at the end, or its some type of a screwed thing. try to explain to someone that canoe.ca site is a valid site? I seen webboards that complained that I was spamming and not using my real email because it was @*.ca . Another trend that is bad, is domain squatting. Many sites haveto resort to .geographical sites (how many are there in the form of onet.com.pl ?) Internet is US based because US people are used to have it available to them at any time. Many Euro countries charge internet by telephone impulse (per minute) so its pretty expensive. Links inbetween Euro ISPs on the other hand are not as much saturated as between US ISPs and Co-Lo.. Another problem is that US has not many backbones linking to EU and ViceVersa.. Thats were US feels that EU has big lag on their servers, and is therefore backwards in technology. I dunno but could it be that all links from US are so slow becase Echelon cant handle any more bandwidth? Just look into how much software and how many sites that are worthwhile are usefull.. And how much portal crap you have from US? What percentage of Spam is US based? Now who is using internet how it should be and who is polluting it? Does polluting Internet with crap make sure the only way to be visible? I hope that US clears up their act and stops polluting internet with their SPAM and Portals crap, and behave as any other civilized country.
Your comment is funny, but it illustrates a very real point. Language barriers are increasingly become a factor on the net because we are encountering people with whom we don't fluently share a common language more frequently. There are several consequence to this. The obvious one is the question of actually communicating with the people we do business with, or want to. Conveying our intentions clearly takes effort. The common vocabulary and context isn't reliably there.
But that leads to other, less obvious consequences. With large transactions, business to business, it is worthwhile to have lawyers on both sides review contracts. There will be an understanding. The contract will specify the remedies if there are disputes. Those will be spelled out in detail at least as great as the contracts for similar transactions that don't cross borders and mix languages.
For large numbers of smaller transactions, the cost of individually reviewing each contract in a number of languages would be prohibitive. That means that there will be some hassles when even well-meaning people have misunderstandings. Furthermore, the customer and the vendor aren't generally the only participants. There will be banks involved transferring funds and billing credit cards. The transaction has to pass muster in a language they can accept.
What about disputes? The merchandise I received wasn't what I expected, or it was damaged in shipping. That isn't a far-fetched scenario. I get things from Western Europe fairly regularly. Magazines get opened, boxes get crushed. So far nothing I've paid for has been damaged more severely than a crease. I've been lucky so far. But how are those disputes going to be handled? Will there be customer service reps available in a variety of languages?
The net will not be what we demand, but what we make it. Build it well.
Someone said Esperanto, but it's obvious that's going nowhere fast.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
What do you call someone who speaks three languages? Trilingual.
What do you call someone who speaks two languages? Bilingual.
What do you call someone who speaks one language? American. (badumpbump)
But, for whatever reason, almost everyone puts up with it. I'm American. I can speak American English fluently. I know snippets of Russian from high school. That's it. When I travel, I can almost always find someone to accomodate me. Quite often on newsgroups, mailing lists, bulletin boards, etc you find messages from [obviously] foreign users posting in broken English. I doubt that there are many Americans posting in broken German on c't's discussion threads.
Why are we allowed this "privledge"? I'm not going to project why that might be (mainly so as not to start a flame war), but it seems as though it is destined to stay this way (Americans, much to my embarassment, certainly aren't getting any smarter). The point isn't that Americans use more bandwidth or that a larger percentage of Americans are online. The point is that the Internet is set up and goverened pretty much however Americans (not that I mean to imply via popular vote) chose/choose.
I think it's pretty lame, myself. I don't like being the big, stupid bully.
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Yes the Web is US-centric, and will likely remian so until (among other things) the US-based TLD's are removed, or at least forced to append a .us to their names, effectively pushing them up a notch.
.mil. There is some cross-over in the .edu domain, but a number of the other will definetly have to be changed.
AIR, the Russian parliament is also called the whitehouse, so why does whitehouse.gov point to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave? Same with
Oh well, just one more in the list of things that need to be fixed with 'net. Put it up on the chalkboard.
--sugarman--
a) The main reason much of the world speaks english as a second and often first language is
:) and btw i like
...".. Just look at the variety
the fact that until some 50 years ago British
Empire owned a multitude of colonies everywhere
and therefore English was their offical language
for quite a while. At the same time them brits
being so important to world trade - their language
also became a common trade language. Aided by the
fact that english is very concise/precise as
opposed to many others - it is and will stay a
universal standard. But Americans got their
language domination ready made.
b) As to whitehouse issue, Russian parlament
is "belyi dom" which can be translated as a
whitehouse, but so can it be translated into
"bait lavan" , "casa blanka"
the latter most..:) As long as domain name
systems exists as it is (primitive single language
mapping of names into addresses) nothing can
solve real problems in it and changing suffixes
won't help either. What will help is a global
directory system where things are found as
per multiple names and attributes. That will also
help stop childish games of "whos the real Joe".
c) Internet as of now is divided in little
national nets with their own rules and lifes.
Russian net is vastly separate both connectionwise
and in terms of society from US which in terms
separate from European (and more subdivided into
other countries) and so on.
Their "e-commerce" (damn the word) is different
too with each country having their own products,
own companies on the web, own payments etc.
Just like you are not likely to order pizza from
Japan by phone being in New York, there is no
reason to do that just because you can access
pizza-hut.jp. I am sure you can call them too...
The internet is yet another tool that allows some
collaboration among countries and cultures but not
more then those cultures would *like* to
collaborate.
d) Cultures do not like to collaborate. Show me
one nation/country that *likes* any other
nation/country? Likes as in "those nice/good
bulgarians/indians/samoas/whatever" as opposed to
"damn
of directly hateful US posts for details. People
(in order to protect themselves) have to belong
to some "society/group" etc and the easiest/most
natural way to belong and differentiate from
others is hate. It is basic reaction that
evolution gave us for our own good.
Internet is not about to change that...
With this, i wish you all good luck and if you
succeed in making world a better place i will
come and visit.
Very interesting read.
.us top level domain name. This would impact all commercial, government, non-profit and military organizations. You will also see sweeping state level legislation requiring all servers and user accounts to have a second level domain name with the state ID Someone in California will have an address of joeuser@aol.ca.us, even though AOL is not based in California (I think they are based in Texas?)
I think that you will soon (within 5 years) see legislation passed on the federal level requiring all servers residing on USA soil to use the
Once that is in place, broad legislation will be enacted to regulate everything from taxes, gambling, warez and pron distribution. All US based servers will be required to conform to a self rating system. Sites that are found to be improperly rated will get the owner punished. There will be no anonymously hosted US based web servers.
Once that is in place, Government Identification will be used for email addresses, regardless of ISP used. Your mail will follow you regardless of how you connect to the internet. Impersonation will be punishable. Anonymous browsing will be eliminated. Your government ID will be required for access to the internet.
This will come to pass under the guise of International commerce regulation, and then under the guise of Interstate commerce regulation (both of which are the US federal government's responsibility spelled out in the Constitution) Then the States will use the Regulation of Intrastate commerce regulation clauses written into each state compact or constitution.