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?

Comments

Within a few years, Europe will pass America!

[Ebbesen]

I think that Europe within a few years will surpass America (more specifically US) when counting the percentage of the population connected to the Internet.

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

Servers have to be somewhere

[ucblockhead]

And as long as servers are somewhere, people will own (and be able to govern) the net.

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.

A free market solution

[dsplat]

Allow e-commerce web sites to select the jurisdiction in which their agreements will be enforced (possibly based on the location of their servers, but not necessarily so), with several restrictions:

1. They can't change jurisdiction without notice and any existing data or transactions continue to be governed under the customers' choice of the old and new jurisdictions.
2. The must post explicit statements about privacy, refunds, security, etc.
3. The jurisdiction they have chosen may collect a tax to cover the cost of this protection.
4. Any jurisdiction may refuse to allow hosting by specific e-commerce sites or all sites based upon its own laws.
5. No other taxation is permitted to be imposed through the site. Customers may be taxed based on where they purchase from or have merchandise shipped to. The business is not responsible for collecting information to aid in this effort.

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.

It's US-centric because everyone lets it be

[boinger]

A German friend from high school (who spoke 5 languages to varying degrees of fluency) used to like to tell this joke:

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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