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What Would We Lose From a Regionalized Internet?
Vegan Pagan asks: "If the internet was separated into regions, how much would you lose? How often do you visit other countries' web sites? How often do you e-mail people in other countries? Do you ever search in a language other than English, and if you do, how often does it turn up foreign vs domestic sites? What would foreigners lose by not being able to visit US-hosted sites, and how quickly would they be able to recreate what they lost? What other process that we are not normally aware of depend on a borderless internet? I find that although I often read in-depth news about other countries, the sites I get that news from are usually hosted in USA, and I only bother to read in English. Would the Americans who report world news be hindered by a segregated internet, or do they already have the means to overcome such barriers? How much more expensive and complicated would it be to access sites outside of 'your' internet, and how much slower would it be?"
I hope we'd lose the Korean and Chinese spam. That would almost make the fractured Internet worth the loss of the tentacle rape porn.
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
would miss 2chan.
This is how it should be. Now the government can create a new branch of the army that will wage war both on and for the internet. We can take over other countires ISPs, under the guise of trying to bring broadband to their country, while we secretly just delete all their content. Then we'll leave and pretend like it never happened.
with an open source project [gentoo.org] many of the people I correspond with are outside of the US. For that matter, a good portion of the people who view and use what I work on are outside of the US. The people who helped me get started doing this, yes, not in the US. It's apparent that the thing to be most largely hindered woud be international coopearation. Why the heck would we want to do that, or rather, advanced it? I see no tangable gains from this idea.
"You're awefully cute, but unfortunately for you, you're made of meat."
...Responses to this will be coloured by the geographical distribution of Slashdot user, e.g. most are USians. I think those who would lose out most would probably be other English speaking countries, like the UK, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. I live in the UK, and I would say that 75% of the sites I visit are US based, 20% UK and 5% other.
My 3D Texturing Skinning work (under construction)
A lot of software for Free OS'es violates software patents and other inane IP law here in the states, so it needs to be hosted outside our borders.
Regionalize the Internet, and I can't play DVDs in Linux anymore.
Slashdot: Where people pretend to be twice as smart as they really are by behaving like children.
Wouldn't you then just have a lot of really big INTRA-nets instead of an INTER-net? Everything outside your INTRA-net has a potential to be lost.
"If all the world's a stage, I want to operate the trap door." - Paul Beatty
I think that the whole success of the internet is it being global and having input from everyone.
And if you go beyond webpages, which en some way or the other can be replicated, imagine not talking to other people in other "regions".
I say absolutely not.
I email other countries all the time- I have friends in London, and some in Germany. When my sister was in Australia for a semester, I emailed her every day.
I visit foreign sites all the time- a lot of British music sites, and I love the BBC. When young, i watched BBC shows, and listened to the BBC World Service on shortwave.
I visit Carnival sites of course.
What the internet has allowed me to do, is see what people in other countries think, not just hear (occasionally, because even the few foreign counties the US Media pays attention to aren't mentioned frequently) what the US media says they think.
So the answer to the question how many foreign sites do I visit is many, and more than once a day.
And All I Ask is a Tall Ship And a Star to Steer Her By
It is hard for me to quantify what would be lost but I can tell you this, I know that the price is too high part of the appeal of the internet for me is being able to expand my perceptions by having disscusions with others of diffrent walks of life.
I don't give a damn for a man that can only spell a word one way.
Mark Twain
You wouldn't be able to play Google Seppuku
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Holy questions batman!
Religion for nerds. Stuff that really matters
I would lose access to a wonderful sweedish website.
0*0
00*
***
Oh nothing much, except
Don't assume that "foreign to the US"="non english speaker". Even if it did, I can see no compelling reason to segregate the net
TBH, I don't really understand why you're asking this; what would anyone have to gain by this?
A lot of sites are hosted in a country other than where their target audience is, for reasons of cost mainly, but also legality.
Think about programs like Skype.
The US is getting close to making sure all encrypted communication has back doors for the government. This rule only seems enforceable on US based companies. Most of us probably didn't think too much about that, since we could always just use Skype or some other foreign based VOIP. Kiss that back up plan goodbye. Access to the executable gets diminished, as well as communication with Skype's servers.
The Government can then start to come down on all questionable content, since all hosting servers will on US soil.
I think internet fragmentation would be one the greatest disasters seen by the modern world. Is that a little over the top? Maybe... But I definitely don't want to see it happen.
One of the key benefits of the internet is that it enables us to hear different opinions. Sure, you can have different opinions in your country (if you can, it's still not so certain in some areas), but it can show you what other countries and the people in other countries think.
You get to see a different point of view, you gain insight, you get to see things from a different angle. You get more information to base your judgement on. Thus your decisions will improve in quality, being based on more information. Not necessarily "better" information, but you can gain insight into the various views different people from all over the world have on a certain matter.
This will enable you to make well founded decisions and it allows you to understand some of the things going on around our planet better. Why some people react "irrational" from your point of view can be explained when you're able to listen to them and see their point of view.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I think there are things that I'd miss--there are informational sites in the UK that I visit occasionally. I would probably miss the BBC. There are also things that you can order from the UK that require a prescription to order in the US, which I might also miss.
Overall, I like the ability to see sites that aren't here in the US. The different perspectives you get when reading about issues on a UK or Australian news site are both interesting and useful in getting a clearer picture of what is newsworthy in (some) non-US countries. I wish I had a better grasp of the other languages I know (Italian and Spanish) so I could better grasp information from sites in those languages.
On the other hand, I'd really like a more convenient way to optionally restrict product searches to US-based sellers. It's time consuming to sort out all the UK sellers when I'm looking to buy electronics, but between the currency conversion rates and the high cost of shipping, it's unusual for me to purchase something from outside the states.
Interested in a Flash-based MAME front end? Visit mame.danzbb.com
What an idiotic question. I don't particularly feel like wasting my time with this; I just felt like I wanted to state the obvious on how idiotic it was.
I regularly take place in online communities from many different countries and continents, seperating the internet would fracture these communities to tiny groups which wouldn't have a point to existing.
The internet is, as I see it, the biggest social step from being a couple hundred countries to becoming a world. The internet allows the social interaction to reach the level of economic interaction, and then proceed to push both further. Fracturing the internet would undo what I see as progress towards a world with less important boarders. Some day, country lines may be what state lines currently are.
If you think education is expensive, you should try ignorance -- Derek Bok, president of Harvard
Only access to the web sites of about half the people I know. And access to half my hardware vendors (including such minor things as case-maker Lian-Li and thermal product vendor Zalman). And access to the support site for my motherboard (made by Soyo). And a huge number of anime-related sites.
Is the picture clearer now?
Every other time I've read "Ask Slashdot", I've thought "that was a pretty fucking stupid question. I wonder if Slashdot can ever get any dumber."
But not any more. Today, I'm convinced Slashdot is as stupid as it will ever possibly get.
Fuck you guys. Seriously. If you're not even going to try to post interesting articles, I'm not going to bother reading anymore. Frankly, you shit on your readers when you post bullshit articles like this, and lately every time I've read slashdot I've felt like I was sharing a shower with tubgirl.
I, for one, would miss being able to read the BBC's news site, which is where I get most of my international news. I also frequently turn up foreign news sites on Google News that sometimes cover things that American news doesn't (and often shouldn't in the case of the Pravda, but I digress).
I also read The Register occasionally for snarky IT, and it's sometimes good to get a feel for what people in foreign countries think about the US without going through the "We're awesome; they're all biased against us" filter. (It's also good to find out who is genuinely biased against us.)
I actually get a lot out of an international internet.
Also, global trade hinges on our current, growing levels of connectivity, and that will never allow some aspects of the internet to ever become fully severed without a huge breakdown in global trade into segemented markets -- which is pretty much prelude to global war.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Part of what makes the Web so great is the ability to surf foreign news sites, download videos of foreign TV shows, foreign music, order from foreign businesses...all the opportunities our corporate overlords here in the US have decided we don't need access to.
Segmenting the internet geographically would be a "Very Bad Idea".
Outside of a little ecomm, a few new sites and sites about truly local (city/neighborhood level) event, everything I use is outside out my country. That includes my photo hosting, web site hosting, email, dedicated servers, the dozenish online communities I'm an active member in. Not to mention MY JOB, which I perform via an extranet platform.
A regionalized internet would seriously hurt the net's diversity. I can't imagine waiting for someone from Poland to re-invent every application that I use right now. What would happen is companies that could afford it, would find markets that can support licensed copies of the app and invest in those markets. So all the little, quarky, cool applications/rss feeds/sites we use every day would disappear outside of their home markets. And that'd suck for everybody, except the corporation that could afford to franchise.
As an academic, I'm expected to read various works in my discipline in the original language. Even after adjusting for international shipping, it often is as much as $100 cheaper to buy a volume of an author's collected works through (for example) Amazon.de instead of Amazon.com.
Also, a lot of works are not translated and are relatively minor outside of a very narrow discipline, and so American bookstores (online or in the real world) do not carry them. Having access to international bookstores via the internet is crucial for my research.
As for communicating with people in other countries -- every day on IRC.
I very often visit international sites. I'm programming in a very specific language and I'm talking to a a select group of talented people in that language a lot. Also for research projects for school I almost always look abroad for content as, being a Dutchman, there's far more content available internationally.
There's a difference within this case of course for large countries like the US where there are lots of content is generated already but this will defenitely harm the many smaller countries. The great thing about the World Wide Web is that I can just as easely speak about something with somebody from Finland, the US, Russia or my neighboor next door.
I make freeware computer games and several months ago I was featured on a Dutch site, last month front page news of a US gaming site, last week at a Czech news site and next month on a German PC magazine. Without the internet a lot of freeware projects would end such as open source development programs and a lot more.
My freeware games
As someone who has no extended family in this country, I (but even moreso my parents) would lose a lot. Our closest relatives are in Canada, followed by the UK, and then the middle east. My mom uses skype to talk to her siblings in the UK at least once a week. Emails to relatives in the middle east are less frequent, but it is truely our only way to contact them, with phone service not being as reliable over there.
Personally, we all stand to lose a lot with regionalized internet. As someone doing research in particle physics, i know how much the High Energy Physics group here relies on being able to access CERN's resources. This isnt just to access their grid (although i use both CERN an BNL's computers), but also to coordinate meetings, actually have meetings via webcam, and much more.
Finally, i dont know where I would be without my daily regement of bbcnews to complement slashdot and cnn.com. Although others may satisfy themselves only with foxnews.com, I, and i think many more, need that trifecta i just listed.
More fool you, then. It's dubious enough relying on the US media to report US news, let alone world news.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
I would lose my software 'sales' associate friends from Russia. j/k
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
Seriously.
...if I was limited to sites in my country, it would be a pathetic resource. Most of stuff I use is foreign. Not necessarily american, but usually outside Poland. And even in Poland I'm often using sites that depend on the net being international - tucows, sunsite, google - I use the net inside Poland usually for local info - maps, news. But then I jump to piratebay.org across the Baltic Sea or astalavista.box.sk some 300km south of me, I use one of the european Furnet IRC servers, travel somewhat further south for Ubuntu updates (and friendly business cooperation offers from Nigeria ;) then struggle through obscure taiwaneese sites for drivers for my motherboard, log in to a talker in Sweden to talk with friends, where they refer me to their own websites in their countries. Until not long ago I'd go to chineese mp3.baidu.com and download the mp3s I wanted using very comfortable search engine, (unfortunately shut down now), but now I have to bump around through several russian sites until I find one that -really- offers free mp3 downloads of what I want, and finally go read slashdot :)
.pl domains, not knowing foreign languages etc. But I know how terribly shallow is their network experience. And that they usually depend on me because they can't RTFM :P
I know many people in Poland who are limited only to
BTW, what if Linus never left Finland and his ftp wouldn't be available across the ocean?
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Let me sum up all those words in the article in two questions:
In other words: "We are not part of a global culture, we are Fortress America and have everything we could ever want right here."
The views expressed in the article are part of the reason why the rest of the world regards the average American as at best ignorant and naive, and at worst simply lame. I sincerely hope the writer was below the legal age to vote.
Professional Idiot
No, the Korean and Chinese spam would just be replaced with Mexican spam, since it's the same region. And that would replace the tentacles with chihuahuas.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
As part of my fun activities, I am regulary in contact with Folks from around the world: DE, AU, NS, etc. I also make regular purchases from eBay.de.
Plus, I work for a multinational with headquarters in Germany. Our business would take a major hit.
Splitting up the internet is a Very Bad Idea!
Why in the world is the question being asked? Before bothering to answer this question, I would like to know what anyone would stand to gain from this. Why is this even something to consider (even assuming it would be feasible at this stage)?
Maybe the next question can be: "What would we lose from getting rid of passports?"
If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe. -- Carl Sagan
Here is a partial list of what I, personally, would lose in one way or another: The KDE Project Ubuntu/Kubuntu/etc The ability to e-mail/IM/Etc. my non-US friends connection with my family a job
I really wanted to change my sig to something witty, but all I could come up with is this.
This approach is contrary to even the word Internet (International Network),
If it was country based I wouldn't even pay for internet access (it would be called state data network access instead?).Internet suppose to be a International medium not a local network.
I wouldn't be able to read slashdot,and
hundreds of sites i frequent.Without Internet present(such a crazy idea to even consider today),economy and trade will collapse,all cultural/informational exchange will
cease or revert to other,less efficient methods(think of breakup of all forums and online communities).
Internet is what shapes 21st century.It a mandatory for technology and progress of human civilization.(i'm not joking,though it doesn't matter to some farmers in Nigeria, it is most important information hub ever created).
I would loose slashdot, as well as, well.... pretty much everything now that I think of it. Not many websites hosted in central america. Well, not many legitimate, usefull websites.
Chances are any disscution on Slashdot will degrade into a flamewar about ID/Christianity within 14 posts.
Pirate Bay. Online gambling. More pr0n than you can shake a stick at. Perl Monks. Gentoo Forums. Slashdot. Newsvine. Lugradio. Digg. Google. Just about every site I go. If it isn't hosted outside the U.S., it has value-added content created by people who are outside the U.S. We're better off isolating the real world, and leaving the internet alone.
Nothing to see here. Move along.
If you really want to know, you could try asking us, there are one or two of us here. But no, you feel you have to talk about us rather than to us.
I guess there's one thing I'd lose - the unconscious jingoism that makes people such as you forget that you address an international audience, even as you speculate on the effects that such a change would have on that very audience. I don't think I'd miss it much though.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
I have no real idea which web sites I use are in the U.S. and which are not. It would be a complete, utter, ruinous disaster for the internet to be partitioned in the way you describe. It would be the ultimate victory for Big Brother. I'm frankly shocked that anyone would even ask this question.
Most of the comments seem to be ANTI or "you're an idiot"
Besides SPAM, would there be any other benefits?
How do you think world news content wanders onto US-based sites?
I bet the computers on which the articles are created and the computers that serve the articles are all connected to different LANs, which are internetworked.
Hm. "Internetworked"...There's something familiar sounding about that.
Or any OS project
Im in a few OS related mailing list, and make a little contribution with 1 project (officially) and try to help in any way I can whenever possible with any OS project I use.
If I had a regionalized internet I would lost like 50% of my interaction (at best) and would not share oppinions and thoughs with a lot of people.
Right now I don't care if the other side is on neatherlands, colombia, my country (mx), usa (like most of the internet people) or anyother place.
Is it enought to make you forget about that so bad idea ?
I'm positive, don't belive me look at my karma
What is the point of this question? Who wants to regionalize the Internet? I don't get why this question is even being asked.
I mean the greatest strength of the Internet is connecting people from all over. When my business associates are overseas it lets me still communicate with them. I have friends in other countries that I otherwise would have never met.
A regionalized internet would not be The Internet.
The very nature of the internet as it stands is what makes is so special. I can jump on IRC or MSN and talk to anyone who I happen to have the nick of. If I want to learn about "Jumping the shark" on wikipedia I can. The uncontrolled nature of the internet is what has led to filesharing, true (or very nearly) free speech, freedom of information (gagging orders are nearly useless at stopping things passing around on the net). I love the internet exactly because noone at the moment really controls it, yes that means spam and script kiddies, but to me thats a small price to pay for the pay offs, I'm just sad that when I tell my kids about how the web used to be, they won't be able to imagine it because the highly regulated one they use won't be anything like it.
No offense meant, but this kind of whining is somewhat pathetic. /., leave it. Go away. Don't read; mainly, don't post!
If you are disliking
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
50% US
.us, .uk, etc? Or are we talking real choke points? As if the European backbone only connected to the US backbone at one point? Or what?
15% British/Australian
35% all other countries
And I get a lot of email from overseas.
I'm wondering how, exactly, the "separated into regions" would work. Is it the old
I'd rather split the internet on the basis of ISPs that allow, or do not allow, spammers to be hosted. There would then be 2 internets, of which one (the clean one) would have rules against spam and any other forms of abuse (but not any rules against any particular content, per se, though local jurisdiction rules would still apply). Any ISPs that allows spammers and other abuses would then be forced to move their connection to the other one (the dirty one), which would, of course, affect all their customers.
Which net would you want to connect to if it turns out all the big ISPs won't or can't connect to the clean net? Suppose there were tunneling gateways where those whose physical layer connection is through a big ISP can still reach the clean net?
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
...they'll create a segment of the Internet for people who know how to spell check and read their posts before they hit submit! That's a pipe dream.
If what you say were really true, people would take to the streets, like France right now, but 100x worse. There is too much value in the Internet, for international business, communication, etc. Heck, didn't both Gore and Bush claim to have created the Internets? No politician will want to be responsible for destroying the immense societal valueadd that is the Internet. They were freaking out when Blackberry/RIM was in trouble.
Not Gonna Happen.
Just try to use US-sites only.
If you don't miss anything, stay with it and stop bothering us with questions dumb as fuck!
What do yuou mean by "regionalized internet"? That's a term with no real meaning.
But to answer some of your other questions, 99% of the sites
I care about use English, but many of those are in outher
countries, and loss of access or difficult access, or pay
per access would be a huge loss. SInce I also provide
information to people in other countries, as well as interact
with them on a couple of forums hoste din the USA, they would
lose as well.
The 1% that aren't in English are either in Spanish or they are
sites where I view schematics, project build photos, or similar
things, and losing those would vary from aggravating to problematic.
Again, I'm really not sure what you're asking other than whether
putting up walls is a good idea (no, it's a stupid one, IMO).
But whatever it means, I don't see much good coming from it.
The fact that the internet is open for most of us is precisely
what makes it so wonderful.
how much would you lose?
Well, the Internet is what I would lose....
How often do you visit other countries' web sites?
How often do you e-mail people in other countries?
All the time.
Do you ever search in a language other than English,
My Google preferences are set to "Any language".
and if you do, how often does it turn up foreign vs domestic sites?
I usually search first in English, then in German, then in French. That is the order of quantity of existing pages in a language which I can read easily. But I may change the order depending on the subject. My main language is really French, but on most subjects for which I search the net, the results in French tend to be much poorer than in English or German.
I occasionally found relevant results in Spanish, Italian or Polish. While I don't speak these languages, for computer related stuff, I could sometimes decipher enough of what I found to make it useful.
What would foreigners lose by not being able to visit US-hosted sites, and how quickly would they be able to recreate what they lost?
It depends. If I had only acces to sites in my own country, the Internet would become pretty much useless. But if the world lost the US and vice-versa, I guess it would be the US which would lose the most. The rest of the world is much bigger after all.
News is where the biggest difference would be, and where the US would lose the most. Since US TV tends to be completely clueless about the rest of the world, all the news sources you have are papers and the Internet. How much of the news in the papers is actually gathered or researched in more depth through the Internet, I don't know.
But what a stupid idea to begin with anyway!...
I think regionalizing the internet would make it cease being the internet. It would be many intranets.
I oftentimes surf german websites. It is sometimes when I exhaust the english sites, or just want to have a different taste. I would get german newspapers, but I can't because of the little body of water between me and them. The internet bands that gap and makes the world a little smaller.
Just think if you would subscribe to a certain internet just to get content like cable. It would take away the whole point of the internet being a sharing community.
Also think if you were to subject everyone to speak english on the internet.
Or if ONE AMERICAN ORGANIZATION OWNED ALL OF THE RIGHTS TO URLS. (ICANN)
Or perhaps you can envision the internet that makes peace between nations and broadens education and innovation to everyone.
You can wall off your internet, but I WANT THE WORLD!!!!
We're all on the same boat here. If you don't don't like being around all these other people, your only choices are to die or get off the planet. Otherwise, you have to learn to get along. You can't go isolating yourself.
I visit sites outside the USA daily. I like to see what other cultures think, especially about the idoits that run this country. I buy and sell stuff online that has a very small niche market. A lot of that market is overseas. I couldn't reach them without a world-wide web.
Well in a business sense, you'd loose the worlds most powerful communications tool. You'd loose the ability to trade shares on anything but your own stock exchange (short of using a third party at any rate). eBay day traders would loose bigtime. Corporate multinationals (Sony, Microsoft etc etc.) would experience a blowout in costs in terms of VPN tunneling equipment (assuming this is even possible under the model you describe).
This is not even taking into account things such as online MMO's, entertainment websites and software, game patch releases from the developers, gambling, porn, news, government communications to embassies etc.
IMHO it would cost billions to completely restructure the internet in this way, including the costs involved in hardware and software to allow organisations that span the globe to circumvent or tunnel through any of the restrictions.
First, let me point out that the Internet has already been through a phase where in had regionalized TLDs. Originally, there were these wide-area-networks (mostly US college-based) that had names like BITNET, FIDONET, and CLARINET. And it was a big deal for a college to be on multiple such. Often you had to get special permission to actually even access any of those, much less multiple ones. Internetwork gateways were magical arcane beasts, not to be trifled with.
This was in the early to mid-80's. By the early-90's the situation had changed dramatically. Gateways where well understood, bandwidth costs had dropped, transfer speeds had risen, and the last vestiges of the original regional networks had vanished for the most part. It was now more the norm for local networks to talk together than not, and most places didn't even wonder about it.
Technically, nothing prevents any nation today from regionalizing their networks; I imagine most have a few top-level DNS boxen that are for the most part wide-open, just as they are here in the U.S. But there are nations today - China, some of the Muslim/Arab countries - that have effectively already done this. And there's *very* little anyone can do to stop it.
In terms of what would be gained: one thing that leaps to mind is that it would stop the least-common-demnominator content laws that have already caused problems. Remember why there's an Ebay Europe, a Google Europe, etc.? A regionalized 'net would allow such issues to be handled without the need for international diplomacy. And you probably wouldn't need ICANN anymore either.
From the corporation's viewpoints, it would also allow much tighter control of their electronic IP. Something they'd enjoy greatly, but not ourselves as consumers.
People have already repeated pointed out various other down sides.
Me personally, I think it's more in the nature of growing pains. When the first small nets started sharing and cross-fertilizing there were a lot of similiar issues (on a smaller scale and with less heat, but similiar). The 'net grew past that. It'll grow past this.
The 'net might fracture. It might regionalize. And I'll miss all the wonderful things I used to access in the other regions. But so will everybody else. And they'll start looking for ways to regain the access, to share information. First, this will just happen with a very small cadre of determined network wizards. But it will propogate quickly down from there. And in short order, the default mode of the DNS won't be grumpy and quiescent, but euphoric and free-flowing as it is now. In some cases, it will be altruism that motivates the first ones. But there are plenty of self-interested reasons as well, many of which have already been touched on.
That new state will probably look a little different that it does now. But I have faith that it will happen.
-- GuardianLurker
Part of the fun of the internet for me has been visiting persons from all over the world.
Favorite chat friends and enemies have come to my screen from everyfrigginwhere.
Pals with bud in B.C. Pals with Bud in Holland.Anti-gun nut Australians.BZflaging Germans.South American QUAKErs.Persons claiming to be from somewhere called Palestine spamming chatrooms with their pathetic moanings.All these people and more make up my internet experience.
Hell,lets find permanent hacks into Chinas intranet and go where we wilst.Let them come freeley also.
I welcome all the chaos the internet has brought with it.Deep inside so do you.
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
How often do you visit other countries' web sites?
...
...", said as if that was an obvious and obviously true fact).
All the fucking time! Slashdot, sourceforge, fsf, userfriendly, linuxquestions and my email providers (one of which is--afaict--hosted in egypt) are all sites not hosted in Denmark.
How often do you e-mail people in other countries?
All the fucking time! Altkeyboards@yahoogroups, the various devs I run into on interesting projects, some indian bloke from LQ,
Do you ever search in a language other than English, and if you do, how often does it turn up foreign vs domestic sites?
I do most searches in English, and as English is not an official language in denmark, most hits are foreign sites.
You have so far displayed the nigh-obliviousness of the existence other countries than the United States of America that I suspect a lot of USAians suffer from (and that really pisses me off). And if they are aware of other countries, they still think USA is just fine and dandy (Dane Cook: "Look, we're the greatest country on earth,
What would foreigners lose by not being able to visit US-hosted sites[?]
(copy-paste) Slashdot, sourceforge, fsf, userfriendly, linuxquestions and my email providers.
how quickly would they be able to recreate what they lost?
Never! If I can't communicate over the 'net with my fellow developers from the USA, India, the Netherlands, etc., then the bazaar development model loses almost everything for people in fairly small countries. Scale the internet down to 3.5 million users (wild guesstimate, five point something like five million people live in Denmark). Then scale the number of gdb developers down by the same number. How many developers do you have left? More than zero?
Imagine this: instead of the net being limited to the USA, it was segmented such that you couldn't cross state boundaries. I think that is a reasonably fair comparison to large parts of the rest of the world. Okay, Russia, India and China would be the most notable exception (Russia mostly due to sheer size, not so much the population count).
That means that you can only download software from www.gnu.org if you live in Massachusetts. And that you could only... uhh... gee, look up some arin records to see where stuff is hosted, and pull some more examples out of your... pocket.
Suffice it to say, it would be really bad if the internet was split up.
Even small companies like the one I work for during the day could suffer because of a regionalized internet. I'm uncertain of the exact figures, but I would wager that on the order of half of our customers are international. Our research instrumentation is shipped around the world and I speak with just as many international customers via phone and email as Americans. I also have friends who live outside of the country, and most of my wife-to-be's relatives live outside the US. If regionalization would eventually introduce any barriers/fees/annoyances beyond what already exist for having transactions of any kind with another country, then it is a terrible idea.
KappaStone
And secondly I would hate it. I search in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean all the time on Google looking for sites in those languages (whether it be song lyrics, information, language itself, articles, etc). The Internet is the reason why I can read/write Hangul, Hiragana, and Katakana, and why I know so much Hanzi/Kanji/Hanja.
I also take time to speak with people from Asian countries on Skype, and it helps me to learn these languages way more (and also French and Spanish too).
Linux -- originated in Finland; contributions from all over the world
Apache -- originated in USA(?), contributions from all over the world
Mysql -- originated in Sweden, contributions from all over the world.
Perl -- originated in the USA; contributions from all over the world.
I think it's very likely that if open source contributors were significantly more restricted by geography, we'ld get significantly fewer contributors to any given product, significantly more duplication of effort, and significantly less useful results.
Open source would suffer; web sites built on open source would be harder to make work. Without the cultural influence of Richard Stallman's Free Software Manifesto, open source and/or free software might not exist in a given country at all. Companies built on open source concepts, such as Slashdot or Google, might not exist yet at all.
As a resident of Canada, I'm grateful to the people in other countries who worked hard to provide useful tools that I can work with. In return, I've contributed bug reports, bug fixes, and code patches to the original contributors; typically, to people miles away in foreign countries, and for mutual benefit. I've asked people in the United States for help with a CCD camera driver, provided patches to a Perl PDF module to the maintainer in Germany, and answered technical questions for people from all over the world.
People have known for centuries that science works better when there's a broad base of peer review and collaberation. I'm always puzzled to see them act so surprised to learn that it works that way with technology, as well.
I forgot to mention in a previous reply that this question betrays a very simplistic understanding of the internet.
;^)
The internet is nothing more than an interconnected series of independently operated networks--some privately run, some government run, but all separated physically, administratively, and financially.
They are interconnected via circuits that generally fall into one of two catagories, transit and peering. Transit circuits are your basic ISP/customer type, where one customer--who could be a smaller ISP--pays for connectivity to a service provider--who may, in turn, pay an even larger provider for their service. Peering circuits are commonly arranged between networks that exchange roughly equivalent amounts of traffic, where neither party bills the other for service. If billing is done on a peering arrangement, one network bills the other based specifically on the amount of imbalance in traffic between them, eg. the network sending more data gets paid.
The only technical aspects of the internet that are centralized administratively are domain naming and ip address allocation authority. This is a pain point for some non-US networks and governments, who want more influence over policy decisions. That's understandable. And if the world manages to wrest total control away from the US-based entities that have complete authority now, things will probably be okay, as long as there remains a single centralized and authoritative system for DNS and address allocations.
If alternate authorities start flourishing, the namespace will get unstable and corrupt, and Bad Things (c) will happen. For example, if your naming authority and my naming authority separately assign "slashdot.org" to different sites, you may get a useful tech news site...and I may get this one.
You'll lose my comments, insensitive clod!
__
Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
At first glance, seems a regionalized internet would actually be good for the US. No more competing with the 10.00/hr programmers in India for example.
Downside is.. you know full well big business would have nothing of it. There would be provisions made so that cheap labor is still available to us companies who threaten to leave.
During the Olympics, I wanted to watch highlights from some of our Canadian athletes. Luckily I found some clips on Google video that linked to NBC. However, when I tried to view them, it said that the video could not be viewed from my country.
Sure it was only a video, but I felt so frustrated, since I was use to being able to view anything I wanted on the net, regardless of my location.
And yes, i also think its worth it... i get 5000 a day .. Sure 99.9% are auto filtered, but its still wasted resources.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
A one-person US-based software company, I have two products which I sell only via the web. My site & product are in English only, and I don't particularly target any particular countries in my marketing. Yet, 50% of my sales come from outside of North America. Foreign sales spell the difference between success and failure for my company. A lot of small software vendors I know tell a similar story.
With a substantial number of Slashdot users (a third?) coming from non-American countries, you would notice quite a difference.
... and occasionally read other languages too (I once managed to understand the gist of an article in Norwegian). I learned German at school - I am not a native speaker.
...
I search in German as well as English
I buy books, CDs and videos over the web from Australia, the US, Britain and Germany.
I download software from all over the world (ALSA is Czech, isn't it - and aalib?).
I read English-language pages in lots of countries: e.g. Russia, China, Japan, India, Spain, Indonesia, Middle-east
I used the internet to book accommodation in New Zealand - and buy my airline tickets there. Picked them up in Australia. I would do the same if travelling to Europe or America.
When I go onto the web, I don't think of myself as being "in Australia", but as being in an international forum. Wish more people would think that way.
I am anarch of all I survey.
I'm a translator, so I'd lose access to online dictionaries and specialized technical sites that I use every day to make a living. I have friends on two other continents and I and my immediate family members travel all over the world a minimum of once a year. I send at least one e-mail to somewhere outside of the United States at least once a day, usually more. Furthermore, chopping up the Internet by country and/or region would hamper my ability to get new clients from outside my region.
If we lose the worldwide Internet, I'm stuck not being able to do my job as well and having much less contact with the people I care about. Segmenting the Internet (because of jingoistic idiocy or any other reason) is just not something I'm willing to consider or accept. Who on Earth would think it's a good idea?
Americans would lose the pirate bay for starters. Then the massive amount of quality pr0n of course. As a finn.. err I guess EU would have its own network so err, well I'd lose a part of wikipedia but I'm sure it would reappear in a matter of days to some EU server. Perhaps some good contributors.. but err there are a ton here too :)
As someone who does not reside in the USA and works for a global company I communicate online with people from other countries on a daily basis.
I also have numerous friends who travel and communicate via email or blogs or other web based technologies.
Sara
Designer, Gamer, Macgrrl in an XP World
This is just another way to screw over the customer and fatten the already filthy rich companies' pockets.
To those companies: I fart in your general direction.
Fighting over religion is like seeing whose imaginary friend is best.
I for one use foreign sites daily. My uses of for foreign sites includes almost everything with the exceptions of my email and my own hosting. I read news, buy stuff, do business communication, read information. send information. Almost all of of the things I use can not be or will not be recreated if cut off. Just look at a map of all the fat pipes crossing the oceans and think about how much use there is. As for dividing into non-connected segments, its stupid. Whjy don't we just cut off any television from foreign countries. Stop foreign exchange of goods. For that matter why don't we just limit all your information to your home town. Stifle all exchange of information. Bloody fascist sounding to me.
/. reader.
-Accountless
It really can't happen. Even if they try there are too many people willing to spend their time and money hacking it all together. It's like asking "what if copying music over the internet became illegal?" The digital world is not determined by law, but more by the common oppion of the hacker*.
* I don't mean hacker in the zero cool sense of the word. I mean hacker in a more real sense, like people who take things that shouldn't/can't work and make it work.
ender-iii
As a non-US citizen (I'm in the Netherlands) I like to keep informed on what's going on around the world. I love the BBC's newsservice, CNN gives me US-specific stuff and some nice background info and even Al-jazeera ain't half bad.
My work (part-time Linux sysadmin) means I participate in mailing lists, browse web sites from all over and email with many people around the world.
In my hobies I find the internet a great tool as well. Inspiration for my cooking, finding guitar tabs, chatting and swapping idea's with fellow LEGO fans and the list just goes on and on.
In my bookmarks I expect around 75% to be from sites not (hosted in) the EU. My addressbook shows around 30% as non-EU.
All of the above activities imply global communication. That is one of the biggest gifts the internet brought us. So why get rid of that? Because of spam? Because of some 419 scammers and the likes? Some of the recent virii?
All those things are small nuisances, which can be fixed technically if certain parties would get their act together, something we as consumers can stimulate by spending our money differently.
And who will gain with this fragmentation?. Probably, like they always prentend, the corporations. Probably the goverments, but more the corporations. With the world fragmented like a DVD zone but with internet, there is a big, really big market to exploit. Centralize and contentrate the consume where they are really strong and then give the remains to the 3rd world. Like they do with everything, but now with internet.
The End of freedom, free speech, and back to the '60s. Like a backstep instead of anything else. But now controlled by who really has the power on this planet.
They are doing this with the HD-DVDs and BLU-Ray. Probably they will success with this framentation.
Nothing better than an average american redneck to sell something with Patriotism when in fact they are cutting and selling their liberities and privacy.
Welcome to the 21st century, the second human dark era.
A region based internet would be silly. It would only serve those who are not interested in thinking outside of their own sphere. I personally use the globalisation qualities of the internet. It expands my horizons and my thoughts. It would a terrible day if the the internet was restricted in this way. In fact, I find the idea repulsive, insulting, and big brotherish.
I don't know anyone who plays those incredibly popular MMORPG in Korea. Probably because they don't speak Koreish.
Seriously, if they were genuinely devided, the U.S. would barely notice, and the other nations would have a baby dot-com boom, as they replicated the best services the U.S. has to offer, and then added other that wouldn't be legal in the U.S. Good for them, ho-hum for us. Besides, seperation is exactly what the Internet is NOT about, so folks who wanted to be connected would suddenly had a good reason to bypass the Internet, and create their own parrellel global networks. I'm sure they're already out there, I just don't rate an invite. You think crime syndicates are comfortable with encryption alone, with all the loot they have to spend? I wouldn't be.
It is a delusion to believe the Internet is controlled or can be controlled. The genie got out LONG ago. Control junkies can only hope to make money from it, not guide or influence it. The Internet has remained cool for so long expressly because of the lack of control.
If Chinese students can routinely bypass the Great Firewall, then what's to stop me or you? Just add motivation.
Shaw's Principle: Build a system even a fool could use, and only a fool would want to use it.
As a Dutch citizen living in the US, I would miss any view points outside the US. I really need to have access to other countries (mainly Europe, but Autralia too) to get an extended view of the world.
A regionalised internet, is in fact, an intranet.
Why don't we just take another step backwards and just communicate with smoke signals?
The reason girls and Windows users don't understand UNIX is because all the documentation is in Man files.
I don't search for a lot of Spanish or German and I only have a few friends and one sister overseas whom I hardly ever e-mail but I do like having the option.
The internet is a success because lots of people like this option. Take it away and it won't be a success for much longer.
Mathematically the potential connections are something like n*(n-1)/2, IANAM, basically an N-squared relationship. Thus balkanising wouldn't divide the internet, rather it would square root it.
Mailing lists - I can't count the number of people on the Yahoo rhododendron list who are from Germany, Belgium, etc. Nihonto (japanese sword) lists - while it's all in english (if you ignore the huge number of romanized japanese words in the postings), contributers are from the US, Japan, England, europe, australia, etc.
Web sites: online Japanese sword shops - more than a few have english versions of their pages, and often they can be useful even without it. Tourist info, local info about places you might be visiting. Maps, sightseeing, etc.
Frequently I'll find myself browsing stuff from Europe (technical pages, hardware, software, all sorts of random stuff). Often in english, when not babel/etc are sometimes useful. Not so often Asia unless they're in English - and they more-than-occasionally are.
Just another random user's examples.
http://knopper.net/knoppix/index-en.html
I don't know. I like having access to foreign sites, even if they aren't in English. What if I'm an foreign expatriot living in America, desiring access to my country's news, or blogs in my native language? Ubuntu Linux for overseas folks? Or companies that want to market to the whole world, not just the US?
A partitioned Internet sounds like a bad idea to me.
I'm a translator, and I access sites in different languages and from different countries every day. Partitioning the internet by region would set translation back twenty years; it would become much more expensive, so fewer people would commission it, which would mean less access to information for everyone. Why on earth would we want to do that?
You guys are so isolationist it hurts. You so need to travel outside the US on occasion and find out about the rest of the world. Seriously.
I have two major problems with this. #1 It is the first step towards censorship. #2 The net is a resource I think of as a way to expand my point of view. While the more culturally removed a source is the less I am likely to read it. By that same token, the more I will learn from it. Therefore, removing 10% of my content is removing 10% of my learning curve. The only other way I could do this is brain damage and I am also opposed to that.
Every act of conscious learning requires the willingness to suffer an injury to one's self-esteem.-Thomas Szasz
The first thing I can think of that would be a loss would be the ability to read news stories from other countries to get a better feeling of what is actually happening.
Google news has completely changed the way I get world news. I can see the same story covered from the perspective of lots of different countries/regions, and try to decide what the issue actually means. Rather than having your news filtered through your nation's lens, it's refreshing to be able to see how France, China, the Aussies, and even sources like Al Jazeera perceive the issue. Each country covers the news from its own perspective. Sometimes it's enlightening to be able to contrast those views.
Somewhere in the middle of all of those perspecives is something approaching an objective view of the world. And that is something that hasn't been quite so readily available historically.
I'm sure there's a lot of things which I don't even notice are coming from other nations that I can't even think of. But, in my mind, once you start losing the ability to see the world from a global perspective, everything else starts to go rapidly downhill.
Teh intarweb has done a remarkable job of making information much freeer, and more available to everyone. Regionalizing it can only be a bad thing. Making global perspectives available to everyone has the effect of allowing people to view things in a more global context -- and to try and decide who is putting spin on what.
My two best examples of this are the issues surrounding the war in the middle east, and issues concerning countries like Tibet and China. Sometimes you can read two stories that say almost competely different things about the same event.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
The question is asked in an American's perspective. I don't think that it's productive to ask this type of question in such a perspective.
Let's face facts.
300 million people live in the States.
6.5 billion people in the world.
5% of the world's population resides in America.
The vast majority of sites are based in the States.
This isn't about 5% of the world losing 35% (arbitrary guess) of the Internet's content. It's about 95% of the world losing 65% of the world's content.
I mean dear god we finally finally have everyone talking, the whole world, discussing issues, getting together and trying to understand the other's point of view, cross cultural debate and ideas being swapped, and now someone wants to take that away? The only reason I could possibly see for a balkanisation would be to control content or limit access to other cultures or ideas, probably for a higher profit. Now isn't that nicely fascist. Not to mention that ultimately someone would come up with a protocol to allow all the different networks to speak to each other. Why we could call it... an Inter Net! Heheh, it really is about time that the telcos figured out that profit is in innovation, not in creating artificial barriers and then charging to get past them. Thats where bad monopolies get spanked.
What he can't kill, he has sex on. Trent.
If the Internet wasn't truly international.. it would totally lose any appeal for me.
Since I started using it in 1990, I've used the Internet almost exclusively to communicate with people in other countries.
With the web even more so.
If you take away the international component, how is the Internet any better than Compuserve, the original AOL, or other such BB services?
...in 5 different languages if it weren't for a borderless internet.
Thanks to a borderless internet, I played subspace (woohoo!) with people from all over the world. Most were American, but in those crazy college days, many friends and squad mates were foreign, due to the fact I often played at ungodly hours of the night which were quite normal on the other side of the planet. I learned to curse people out in languages from places as far west as the Phillipines and Malaysia to as far east as Russia.
I have a better idea, lets build a massive wall around the USA, then take away only the usefull and productive parts, and just leave them there. Also, to the next guy that has a reverse-effect not-so-insightful idea: GET LOST The Internet (tm), should be forever free. Seriously though - segregating the internet into zones sounds a bit hollywood'ish. I bet SOMEONE would make a huge profit from this if it ever happened. But I seriously hope some government approveds publicly displayed executions of stupid people.
The internet isn't the property of the United States, and it's an incredible conceit to assume that it is. This is one of the dangers in continued US control over ICANN. I suspect that in the minds of some of the members of the current US administration foreign ideas automatically equate to dangerous ideas.
Fragmenting the internet along national or regional lines makes it that much easier to control. I have no doubt that certain governments would like to control their citizens' easy access to information, goods and services. Those governments aren't just in the Middle East or China.
Fragmentation is the first step. Taxation will be the second, both as a means to provide revenue and further restrict access. As paranoid as it sounds, it's about controlling people, not just the technology.
FTA: How often do you visit other countries' web sites? How often do you e-mail people in other countries? Do you ever search in a language other than English, and if you do, how often does it turn up foreign vs domestic sites? What would foreigners lose by not being able to visit US-hosted sites, and how quickly would they be able to recreate what they lost? What other process that we are not normally aware of depend on a borderless internet? I find that although I often read in-depth news about other countries, the sites I get that news from are usually hosted in USA, and I only bother to read in English.
AFAIK around 50% of slashdot visitors are not from the US. A lot of us visit this place, despite the constant fighting and general stupidity because it gives us an outlet on the world, and a chance to use our English. I know Americans tend to be ignorant of the rest of the world (and no, that wasn't a troll, it was what the OP wrote above) but it would do Americans the world of good to realise just what is happening elsewhere and what REAL foreign people think about issues in general, not only American foreign policy (that is almost universally disliked in any case), and not the utter commercially distorted crap that passes for news in the US (our news is also often crap, but it's a tiny bit less plastic than *bc, cbs etc). Likewise it is good for us foreigners to see what moves you (or doesn't).
Isolation is only going to hurt yourselves, and if you do it out of some mistaken sense of hurt national pride ("them furriners don't like us controlling the internet"), you'll only be doubly surprised the next time some international wacko comes round to bite you in the ass.
Just a reflexion about that thread and a quote I read on IRC :
'The problem with the global village are idiots of the village'
So if some people think they want a segregated internet, just let them do so,
then there's a chance to get rid of those idiots...
Guyzmo
``Ford carried on counting quietly.
This is about the most aggressive thing you can do to a computer''
This would be bad for me:
1. I do a little consulting work for people in other countries (Europe and one company in India)
2. I like the variety of news from international news sources
Sometimes I wonder if the "owners" want to screw stuff up in the U.S. A world-wide internet is necessary for business. Add to this what seems like a "dumbing down" of our school systems in the last few decades, and I have to ask, what gives?
On a tangent: the thing with software patents is similar: almost all money spent on software is spent for private development and a rich ecosystem of both open source and commercial software makes things go. If we in the U.S. can't use (in the future) Linux, etc. that is going to really hurt our competitiveness.
Anyway, I don't think that a separate internet will happen - just goes against the grain of what is good for business.
I find that although I often read in-depth news about other countries, the sites I get that news from are usually hosted in USA, and I only bother to read in English.
Yeah, thanks for defying that stereotype about Americans...
For the rest of us who show a legitimate interest in other cultures and bother to study other languages, it's nice to be able to access original, foreign content.
Also: Asian porn. I like big, Asian butts, and I cannot lie.
Not much different here. Most of stuff I use is foreign. Not necessarily chinese, but usually outside US.
I'm sorry, but if you think you're reading 'world' news from a USA site, you're sadly mistaken. I've never seen a media that finds it so difficult to grasp the concept of countries - many countries - outside their own country.
Read http://news.bbc.co.uk/ and see what you're missing.
Yes, you guessed right: I'm not "American"...
"What Would We Lose From a Regionalized Internet?"
Internet.
Kaetemi
I would get bashed like a patato, modded "overrated" and "flamebait" and "offtopic", and buried for the eternity. Wow. Life is like online poker...
There are many communities on the Internet where the number of members in each country (or some countries) may be low, but the worldwide population is large enough to remain vibrant and interesting. As a software developer, many of the tools I use and research I conduct is web based and almost none of it is local. There are large amounts of useful information contained in (who would have guessed?) blogs.
In the US, we'd lose most of the good bittorrent sites.
Outside the US, they'd lose most of the Web, period.
Stupid -- like a fox. "Vegan Pagan"'s homework assignment was just written by all the troll feeders.
What bothers me, though: "Why?"
Why introduce artificial road-blocks?
If that's a good idea, why stop at the national level? Why not divide the Internet at the state or city level. That would be much better!
We would lose the convenience of accessing most of our information using a web browser. A "regionalized internet" really just means separate IP routing domains.
Applications that do not need to exchange data in real time would simply use other transports. Surely a massive resurgence of SMTP/UUCP and NNTP/UUCP gateways would be the logical outcome. This would be a pain in the arse, but we would still be able to exchange information globally (just as we were before the widespread deployment of IP). As a rather nice side effect, this might also provide the necessary motivation for some clever person to figure out how to reduce the degree of spam and porn saturation on usenet to make it usable again. Who would fund these gateways? Presumably the large number of corporations that are now utterly dependant on email communication with their overseas clients/suppliers.
Unfortunately, some applications (VoIP is the most obvious) DO need to exchange data in real time. Without VoIP, what happens to the value proposition of call-centre offshorers, to take one example? The answer of course is that IP is not the only choice for Layer 3 protocol, and all these sorts of applications need is a low-cost-per-link-segment packet-switched network with points of presence near enough to each end of the link (owned & operated by people/companies that don't practise price-gouging). The (global IP-based) internet fits the bill perfectly, but it's not the only solution. Another option is a large number of gateways between the (seperate, overlapping) IP spaces of each nation. It would be horrible to administer, and everybody would need to get comfortable with source routing, but ultimately it would win out over being isolated. Just a moment, I seem to remember a similar X.25-based scenario a decade or two ago...
There's at least one distro out there (it's been mentioned here many times, but this "no DVD" meme continues so I will make you work to find out because you aren't paying any attention) where you can get legal dvd playback for five dollars. Same with MP3 legality, that is available as well. The catch? The distro paid the price, then charges for the service. Then they get nothing but shit on by the leet community. Most distros won't pay any money for software that isn't free, just telling you with a wink wink and nod nod where the dodgy warez servers are in lower slobovia where you can download this or that crack. But technically, you *can* play DVDs legally under linux in the US.
.005% of the time they spend wanking to pr0n, actually doing anything politically out in meatspace other than bitching on internet forums, a lot of this stuff would have gotten sorted out a long time ago.
Yes, it sucks, but some things-gosh darn it-are just going to cost money. Such is life until you can get the laws changed or do something else that scratches that hollywood video itch, such as maybe boycotting those movies that require the use of propietary codecs and go to enrich the movie moguls. Avoid that, there's nothing stopping you from viewing DVDs. And for 25$ you can just buy a DVD player for that matter, I have one, works fine, hooks to the big screen and plays any DVD I have tried in it so far.
If geeks spent 1% of the time they spend playing "video games" or
It's easier to complain than to work at things. People have skewed priorities over what is important or not. Music and movie downloading, games, etc are to geeks what football and nascar and WWF wrestling are to mouth breathing jocks,just a way to waste time and by transference try to prove that your life has some sort of meaning. *Transference*.
I have no sympathy any longer. People get the government and laws they deserve, mostly by sheer lack of interest and inattention. The only people I feel sorry for are the poor souls who actually try to get things changed for the better by working at it. Less than 1% of the population is truly politically active, the rest just sit passively and eat it, content with their bread and circuses action and a little complaining. They achieve their psychological victories by having "their team" win "the big game" or by getting that "high score" in some completely brain dead blood guts and gore video game. Then they wonder why things stay screwed up, generation after generation. It's because that's the way most people like it! Humans are the most lazy and masochistic creatures on the planet when it comes to changing things that are important and need to be changed. they are more content to just get old what to do, and meekly follow orders or try a little scam here and there and "stick it to the man" by downloading some tune or some crack.
... which is about equally likely to happen
In general, there'd be a lot of whitelists to join for outsiders wanting into Iran, Saudi, etc, and DNS remapping for getting between places like the PRC and the US. Anyone not mapped wouldn't exist. How hard it would be to get mapped would differ depending on the politics of the case.
Luke, help me take this mask off
fyi
septic tank - yank.
When I go watch (korean) music videos or INTERNATIONAL NEWs (ie. written by news company in different country)
you would lose my money!
newegg, amazon, ebay...
no soup for you!!
Fact is most sites are in English, whether or not they're in English-speaking countries. American English is fast becoming the lingua franca of both the internet and the business world; if you (ignorantly) think otherwise just take a look at how Asia is scrambling to import ESL teachers for the sole purpose of making their populations (especially the younger generation) fluent in the language.
These countries are smart; they know that there isn't a chance in hell that the rest of the world is going to learn Korean, or Japanese, or Chinese, or any one of the one hundred or so 'unofficial' languages that various parts of Indonesia speak. But many countries have a very strong program designed specifically to make their citizens fluent in American English because they know that a common tongue is needed for business, and that common tongue was settled by American supremacy and the internet some time back. Whether or not America remains supreme is utterly beside the point; a common tongue is *useful*, and even if America disappeared from the planet tomorrow it would *still* be American English. Far too many countries have invested too much time and effort (and money) to suddenly shift gears and try to convince everyone that, say, Bundu would be a better choice for international communication.
So yes, regionalization would suck even if you don't understand the simple fact that not every American English site you vist actually happens to be in America, or run by Americans. But then what do I expect from a bunch of ignoramuses on Slashdot, eh?
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
By far the worst part is that we'd lose the cosmopolitan nature of the internet. The great thing about it is being able to meet and be influenced by people from all over the world. At various times in my online life I've had friends from Canada, several different Western and Central European countries and New Zealand.
If all I wanted to do is interact with the dumb fucks surrounding me, I'd go outside and interact with them.
How many questions can you write in a single /. submission? Are they a lot? A few? More or less? Didn't you feel tired after reading the übertopic? No? Why? am I leading you into thinking about something? Yes? Is it blue? Do you usually find it in a Church?
I am right now, you idiot.
The first thought I had was how could such a stupid question like this get accepted. What a completely ridiculous idea :-)
;-)
The second thought I had was how truly frightening the impact would be. A regionalized internet would be devastating to the evolution of ideas like the social web.
Sites like Flickr would lose their power if users were not allowed to explore outside of their home region. I am constantly amazed by how well people communicate across social and language barriers on sites like these. I can't count the number of times I have toured a distant city through the eyes of the people who live there.
Many more examples were listed in previous posts, so I will not dupe.
Kudos to the editors for letting this one through
OS X, Linux, Tivo, Amiga, my fascination with cult-like technologies would intrigue any psychiatrist.
Sounds like the power elite wants to bugger the rest of us. Again. Free international communication scares the bejesus out Those In Control.
As an American living in Japan, I think that would have a very serious impact on my internet browsing. Even for people in less extreme situations than mine, just how much do you rely on foreign sites every day? (Hint: just because it's in English doesn't mean it's in the US.) How many businesses and educational institutions work internationally?
Perhaps the question isn't, "should the internet be regionalized?" but "should the US segregate its internet from the rest of the world?" It's an insanely stupid proposition, and the rest of the world would simply build an open internet without them. The only people who would get hurt would be the US.
"Give a man fire, and he'll be warm for a day; set a man on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life
Every time I hear slack-jawed idiocy from IT professionals about partiontioning the US from the rest of the world using technology I am at once enraged and pleased. Enraged because its embarassing to share a profession with folks who through some combination of odious nativism and sheer blindness don't realize how interconnected we are at the moment and how quickly this trend is accelerating. Pleased because it means my strategy of "you can globalize yourself or you can globalize your job: pick one" will continue to result in job security over folks who just don't get it.
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
I'm a United States Marine stationed in Okinawa Japan. My wife is in the United States Navy, stationed on a ship who's home port is in Norfolk Virginia. Her ship often goes out to sea for months at a time, and is due to head out to Iraq for 6-8 months next year. While they are out there floating around they have internet access. I can't fathom at all how an international, worldwide internet could benefit our ability to communicate in any way whatsoever.
I visit and read non-US and non-English sites numerous times every day. Mostly German French Spanish and Italian as these are the languages in which I sufficient fluency as to not need Babelfish et al. Regionalized Internet is a BAD BAD BAD idea.
http://bash.org/?142934
...!!!!!! FUCK FUCK FUCK
docsigma2000: jesus christ man
docsigma2000: my son is sooooooo dead
c8info: Why?
docsigma2000: hes been looking at internet web sites in fucking EUROPE
docsigma2000: HE IS SURFING LONG DISTANCE
docsigma2000: our fucking phone bill is gonna be nuts
c8info: Ooh, this is bad. Surfing long distance adds an extra $69.99 to your bill per hour.
docsigma2000:
docsigma2000: is there some plan we can sign up for???
docsigma2000: cuz theres some cool stuff in europe, but i dun wanna pauy that much
c8info: Sorry, no. There is no plan. you'll have to live with it.
docsigma2000: o well, i ccan live without europe intenet sites.
docsigma2000: but till i figure out how to block it hes sooooo dead
c8info: By the way, I'm from Europe, your chatting long distance.
** docsigma2000 has quit (Connection reset by peer)
Starbucks, Harbuckle of Breath.
More importantly: what would be the function of regionalizing the internet? Why is it important to someone that I cannot access information from overseas? Who is the someone trying to block my access to this information? If the answer to any of the above questions involves a level of government than it is no different than the PRC's attempts to limit its citizens' access to the internet. And to look at it from another angle: it's too late. Once people have been exposed to freedom, there are always going to be those who will not abide later restrictions on that freedom.
Lose: misplace or fail || Loose: not bound together
My company has offices in the US, UK, France, Germany, Spain, Korea, and a number of other locations around the world. If the internet were to be divided along national boundaries (and I'm assuming this counts the web, email, Usenet, everything) then we'd have to jump through hoops to have our technical support staff in those other countries contact our headquarters in the US when they received questions from customers that they didn't know how to answer. In addition, we have a newsgroup that a lot of international users participate in extensively; we'd lose that user partitipation, which would be a shame.
;)
I wouldn't mind seeing some of the more prolific spammers out there exiled to a small, remote, barren island somewhere with no contact (electronic or otherwise) with the outside world, however. Think Survivor, except people get voted _onto_ the island for spamming, and the viewing population wins
It is much easier to promote war if you can prevent people from talking to each other. Were it not for the ability of people to communicate I would expect the Veitnam war might still be going on.
I am sure there are many people who may not see this connection. However, we must consider the FUD that propaganda departments spew. In fact the very existance of propaganda departments illustrates the idea.
One of the biggest benefits the internet confers upon people is the ability for everyone to freely and inexpensivly communicate with anyone else in the world. Those who wish to prevent people from commuicating with each other are the same ones who wish to control people. A question to be asked is if Hitler could have prevailed in a world where people can freely communicate?
It is my opinion that people are generally able to weed out the ideas they don't like or which have destructive intent. By creating barriers between groups of people, information is not allowed to flow as freely.
The question that needs to be asked is "why"? Why is it necessary to partition the net? Address space is not a good reason because there is no shortage of addresses - especially with IPV6. Numbers are plentiful and free even though large vested interests like to charge for IP's. Effeciency is not a good reason. Ease of use is not a good reason - the present country codes work well enough.
The only anwers that make any sense is that certain folks like to have power - power to control people - and they don't like opposition to their power.
I'd lose access to http://www.slashdot.org/, http://www.pgdp.org/, & http://www.wikipedia.org/, since I live outside the U.S. That would mean I'd have an average of another hour and a half a day for work, increasing my salary by 15%. Good thing! But after a few weeks without slashdot (and other sites like it) I'd go insane from boredom and need a long vacation, at my own expense, of course. So, on the whole, seems like not such a good idea...
Novartza. The best coffee brand east of the Nile.
Clearly this question arises from the recent attempt by the rest of the world to give control of the Internet to the dysfunctional, worthless UN.
If the world insisted on this, I think that the US should most certainly say to hell with the rest of the world and the rest of the Internet.
Before you take jabs at me, think about it... For you non-US folks out there: How sorry would your daily Internet experience be without US participation? It would suck.
For most Americans, the experience would be hardly changed at all. Call that arrogance, stupidity, yada yada yada. It is the truth. I can't remember the last time I visited a non-US site. How many non-US surfers can go a day or a week without visiting a US site?
Sorry guys... Heads we win. Tails you lose. That is just the facts.
Please note: I see nothing productive in doing this. One Internet is clearly better than many. My point, though, is that if the rest of the world wants to try to hijack something that the USA thought of, funded, and built, then to hell with the rest of the world.
They will suffer far, far, more from balkanization than we will.
We will just sit back and wait for you to cry uncle, and laugh the whole time.
I am seriously getting tired of this kinda junk. I used to come here and read interesting breakdowns of technology, useful utilities and discussions on the various operating systems of the world, dominately Linux ofcourse, Good discussion on political issues, Etc.
Now the latest question is what could happen if we regionalize the Internet.
Jeez, do you have a clue, this is bottom of the barrel stuff.
Common sense if you are in the industry. Down right scary. Did Slashdot get taken over by my managers?
Seriously, are you Robert? Huh? Tell me the truth!
I am so not coming back!
No, Mexico is part of a Spanish-language speaking region, and not part of the particular English-language region the US belongs to. Really, these 'regionalized' spheres of the Internet already exist. There is a sizable contingent of English-as-a-second-language participants on forums like this, but mostly the people in this forum are US, Canadian, or UK citizenry. (the 'rest of you' are, obviously, very welcomed. I am just stating fact, not defining boundaries to exclude anyone.)
If they broke the internet into little pieces.. that'd be bad on soooo many levels, but the one that would probably bother me the most is that I have a lot of friends in other countries, and I don't want to spend a bunch of money to send them mail. [ which is also incredibly slow ] :-\
I know people in Columbia, Brazil, UK, Germany, Australia, Japan, etc. I would be very lonely if they broke the internet.
If con is the opposite of pro. Then isn't congress the opposite of progress?
Yes- The US and US Companies (both large and small businesses) are, by many factual studies responsible for more of the Spam received by US users.
Now- That doesn't mean that the Spam messages originate within the US, and this is where WHAT you measure becomes important.
US firm wants to sell product
hires foreign Spammer to do his/her dirty work
profit?!
-M
when you see the word 'Linux', drink!
Segregated Internet is the first step on a slippery slope. On a side note, its also a step away from the whole idea of a central, unified earth government prevalent in most sci-fi novels and world peace bunny-kissing cults (I'm a fan of the former).
I would be willing to bet that 90% of slashdot will answer "no".
Heck, I don't browse much of the internet outside of North America, although I do occasionally browse in French, and well, France *is* still the center of that universe.
"No problem. I have the capacity to do infinite work so long as you don't mind that my quality approaches zero."-Dilbert
that people are replying to it!
1. The music from my favorite artists comes from Australia. I've had to buy some of it thru Australian web sites.
2. The people that work on a particular hardware / software project come from Germany, Switzerland, England, and Japan. I do beta testing for the guys from Germany and Switzerland. The guy from England and I did a password crack together. The guy from Japan got some info on the thrid party data file from me.
3. I've bought e-bay items from England.
No, regionalizing the internet just seems like a stupid idea to me.
I thought what made the internet so great was its borderless nature. I couldn't even start to list all the non-US people who have contibuted to my online experience, whether it's from collaborating on open-source projects, or just offering insight on the ways of the world and divergent philosophies that are mostly inexistent (or wholly censored) in western society. Even worse: I'm in Canada. Does that mean I'd only see Canadian sites ?
The whole concept is absolutely ridiculous and a huge leap backwards. The only downside to having an intercontinental internet is that some people are finally realizing they're getting fucked over by their government. That's only a downside if you're one of the vicious tyrants misleading the population to begin with.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
What would foreigners lose by not being able to visit US-hosted sites, and how quickly would they be able to recreate what they lost?
There are more then two regions. US and non-US are not regions. First please tell what regions you are talking about. Then perhaps a more serious answer can be given.
At this moment there is a regonal internet: Our solar system. Pretty regional where I come from.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
I'll take a wild guess, is the poster picturing the US government and ICANN holding the Internet hostage at some point in the future? Then the EU says "F this" and sets up its own system, China takes the cue and sets up a hyper-controlled national network, because why not?, and...
Yes, as the parent suggested, the Internet will find a way. It would be more of a pain to connect to international servers, and a large part of the global Internets (as eerily predicted/mispronounced by GWB) would be invisible without some work on the user's part.
But I don't think we would let it get to that point, anyway.
If the internet was separated into regions, how much would you lose?
It's funny you ask this question, because just this morning, I was realizing how much of a unifier the Internet is.
I needed to write an e-mail message from Canada to a supplier in Germany. So I wrote the simple sentences myself in German and got Google to translate the tough stuff for me. Of course, machine translation is pretty dodgy, so then I went to google.de to check the machine translation against the entire opus of German searchable texts on the Internet. If this ability was around when I was a kid, I would be a six-language polyglot by now.
How often do you visit other countries' web sites?
With the exception of commerical websites, it's really hard to tell where your information is coming from. Even if you limit your searches to English, you're bound to hit popular sites in England, the USA, Canada, Australia, South Africa, India, and who knows where else?
Sometimes I'm curious about a country, so I go and search around it's part of the Internet. The layout of webpages is the same around the world, so once you've got the naviation down pat in one language, you can puzzle your way around another easily.
I surfed a bunch of Icelandic websites once, just to see webpages load with those weird characters that died out from Old English, the thorn and eth characters. (I don't know what character encoding Slashdot uses, so I won't post them here. Go look them up: Thorn's a lowercase b and p put together. Eth looks like a d with a horizontal bar driven through it.)
As a memory exercise, I'm thinking of learning Japanese, just to prove that I can remember two thousand arbitrary-looking ideograms. It's nice that I will be able to test my progress simply by loading up a free Japanese daily paper online and trying to discypher it.
How often do you e-mail people in other countries?
All the time. I work for a global company, so I'm often asked to do exactly that. I prefer to communicate with those who write in English, but I'm willing to try my French and German skills out if necessary.
Do you ever search in a language other than English, and if you do, how often does it turn up foreign vs domestic sites?
Sure. There seems to be a Google for ever ccTLD around. Why not try some yourself?
What would foreigners lose by not being able to visit US-hosted sites, and how quickly would they be able to recreate what they lost?
Personally, I would miss Questionable Content, the Onion, Homestar Runner, and Slashdot. Is Wikipedia also American? If it is, then I'd miss that too.
For news, I prefer the CBC, the BBC, NewScientist, and TheRegister. American news sites seem to be about natural disasters, race violence, crime, and celebrity gossip. So there would be no loss there.
How much more expensive and complicated would it be to access sites outside of 'your' internet, and how much slower would it be?
This is an absolute non-starter. Why would anyone want to regionalize the Internet? The strength is that the Internet really is a universal medium. If I address a message to you@somedomain.com, it doesn't matter where I am in the world -- it will get there.
Compare that to telephone service. I want to dial France? From Canada? Um, that's 011 for international, 33 for France, drop the 0 at the start of the French area code but dial the rest of the area code, then the number. Now let's say I want to dial the same number while travelling in Portugal? Um, I give up! I don't know! It keeps changing!
Seriously, the fact the URLs and e-mail addresses are fixed is one of the best innovations of the last century. My hope is that free, relatively-good machine translation will blossom. Erasing the language barrier will show citizens around the world just how much they have in common. When you can read an Arabic or Punjabi website directly instead of having it filtered through your own local politicians' and media's biases, then you will gain true insight into other people and cultures.
Americans who only know 1 language, and who will only engage other Americans will never know what they loose.
"If the internet was separated into regions"... scarry idea. I live in Venezuela (south america), and the internet here is SOO incomplete, consisting of just web pages of tv stations, goverment, hotel, malls, tourism sites (for english visitors mostly).
I'm not counting the bunch of personal pages hosted on foreign services like yahoo, angelfire, google, blogger, flickr, etc. It's the same case as the Televesion, which is HORRIBLE. Just imagine watching 10 game shows a day (with a price of like $500 or less),interviews with (or anti-) goverment people , or worse, the president chavez 2-5 hours national broadcast Personally, i'll just go crazy without foreign internet access//WR
What do we lose? A portion of a global pie of openly-available information.
:-) On one side, you have a closed, proprietary vendor who sections-off their OS code, etc. from the outside, and only if you are a super-player (e.g. a government of a highly-developed nation) can you gain access, and then only under restriction. The OSS world of software, by contrast, is open for all to see. MSFT closes off (regionalizes) their information to the rest of the world; OSS is open to the whole world. One is protectionist about their code; the other, free-as-in-beer and free-as-in-speech free-traders of information.
We go from having a truly-globalized free-market and free-trade of ideas and opinions, one in which the collective wisdom is available for everyone else in that global crowd, to a protectionist trade of information, in which you have to be a member of some elite, local club and know people to get in and gain access.
I'm thinking of so many parallels in computing and economics this subject makes my head spin; obviously I've started with a clear economics analogy. But what about the analogies from the computing world?
* Warez groups -- You have to know people and gain their trust to get in to some groups and trade with them. They have, in a sense, "regionalized" some of their content that would otherwise be made available (were it not illegal under copyright laws. That's another issue, although related in terms of the protectionist regulation that IP law imposes).
* Businesses -- Want access to internal corporate data? Hack one of their boxes (exploit stupid users with a bot you've written that is attached to an email claiming to have naked pics of Maria Sherapova, although, this assumes the spam filter doesn't detect and discard the message, and that the heuristics of the virus-scanning software doesn't detect your bot as a trojan); social engineer your way to a username/password combo (i.e. play con-artist); or become employed there. Businesses have cordoned-off their proprietary information from the public-at-large, except for product information.
* For-pay websites -- Many newspapers (such as The Economist and the NYTimes) require you to have a subscription to access premium content. They have compartmentalized their proprietary information into a pay-to-play region they've defined.
* Microsoft vs. F/OSS -- What better example for Slashdotters?
Those are some present-day examples of what happens when information is sectioned-off from the rest of the world.
Now imagine that being the case with *ALL* information, of all kinds -- not just corporate or proprietary information. Medical information; university research; open-source software; statistical data about a variety of subjects; the list goes on and on.
I began by saying this is a scaling problem. It is, and to make my case clearer from the computing side, answer this simple question: how much combined data do you have on your LAN at the moment?
In a private residence of just one or two people, you might have, at most, a couple TBytes -- and that's if you're recording TV shows and movies all day (legitimately, I assume!). Even on a large engineering university's LAN, you might have no more than a couple PBytes (I'm guessing; my last experience on a uni LAN was in 2001, when there were some 6 TBytes indexed by our unofficial file-share indexer, on a LAN with 26,000 students, plus who knows how much storage space the university's depts. officially had).
Now compare that to the rest of the the 'net 532,897 TBytes, and that was way back in 2002.
There is no reason or excuse for outright political/legislative *bans* on the flow of information on the Internet. Period. Restricting the rates at which that information travels (perhaps by way of packet-shaping), or restricting the access to
Is Capitalism Good for the Poor?
I have been having trouble with websites regionalizing their interfaces. Rather than asking you what you want, they determine by your IP where you are.
I live in Taiwan, and I find that I am frequently blocked or forced to use a Chinese interface because of where I am. All language interfaces should be optional.
The blocking is a more serious issue. I frequently cannot read stories linked by Slashdot to various sites including USAToday. I have resorted to using Tor to get around this, but the implications for Free Speech are frightening.
Do websites have the right to categorize users based on where the login from? Is filtering the news for different audiences legal and/or moral? Is filtering a form of censorship?
I can understand the value of targeted advertising, but should we allow targeted advertising or spam filters or whatever to restrict what we see, and by extension what we know?
Many non-USians complain that the news in the US is so slanted that it seems as if the rest of the world combined is less important than the US. News agencies in different countries certainly have different viewpoints. If these are denied to people for whatever reason, will they be more ignorant of world affairs? USians are frequently accused of being ignorant and jingoistic for precisely this reason.
The ability to read news or blogs or whatever in different countries and languages cannot be a bad thing. It is probably the best thing that has happened to education and freedom in quite a long time -- maybe ever.
Finally, just because one Slashdot poster is too lazy to read sites in other languages does not mean nobody else should have the option. Even if the majority felt that way -- which they probably do -- it is not right to deny those who can because of those who cannot or will not. Every restriction of freedom should be justified. The ignorance of the majority is never a justification for imposing ignorance upon those who know more.
Anyway, for people who want to succumb to regionalism, there is always TV.
All data is speech. All speech is Free.
If you speak one language, you might not see the problem. However mostly only North Americans speak only one language -- English (okay, and mabye I'll include the British too). However the rest of the world speaks multiple languages. We North Americans are just too single-sided, one-point-of-view. It obvious by the question that was posted.
It's bad enough Blue Death Star, Inc. (AT&T) wants to send a bill to congrees to limit how much we download (do a Google search and you will find that the telecom industry wants to hurt the internet industry), but talk of only being allowed to access websites within my own country? I find more help online overseas and in other languages than I do in the Midwestern United States in English.
Blue Death Star needs to realize the days of Telnet, and local BBS are nearly gone. Heck, I called the local phone company once if they knew anything about anly local Telnet or BBS servers and they would not divulge that information.
They are trying to put a cap on what we see and do.
Eventually this will bite them in the ass when more hacking attempts spring up again.
If they want to go back to the days of Telnet and BBS, then they should also be prepared for the return of the Legion of Doom, Masters of Deception, even GURPS.
This country is at the breaking point. When they find out they can no longer contact their clients in other areas or other parts of the world, there will be hell to pay. Perhaps a civil war against big corporations who took their rights online then too the world was listening.
The Rapture is NOT an exit strategy.
Who would gain? National and regional leaders would gain power at the expensence of the population, as it would become easier to control the flow of information, and and only give people access to their side of the story.
Passports is similar, it put the power of where you are allowed to travel into the hands of the governments, which is basically a ridiculous idea.
It is amazing what we, the people, put up with.
I work for an important ISP in Argentina and the "normal user" has a bandwidth distribution of 80%/20% international/national. These are mostly corporate users and smaller ISP's. I'm not sure how much of this traffic is going to the US, but I'd say that 50% - 60%.
But, what's the point of this question anyway?
What would we lose if we regionalized the internet? What would we lose? We would lose the internet. The internet is more the one country. The internet is more the the websites that make it up. The internet is the idea of free un-restricted access to the world, un-restrictred access to other peoples and their ideas.
The truth is that most people don't read websites from other countries nor do they communicate with people who speak other langauges, there are however people who do.
The internet is not about region is about connecting people from different regions of the world. The more people that take part the more connections that exist. The more connections that exist the more the internet grows. I will firmly say that any act that will regionalize or compartmentalize the internet will only destroy the things about the internet that have made it so amazing and powerful in the lives of the citezens of this world. How great is it to be able to read a blog or a news site from indonesia or australia? How great is it to exchange political and philosophical ideas with people who have never been within 1000 miles of the United States? I can't imagine anything that could be more detrimental to the real identity of what the internet is.
Every facet and site on the internet should be free and open to all. WITHOUT EXCEPTION. Stop the coporate take over release the internet from the bondage of men trying to make money. Allow the people of the world to unite freely without borders or regions. Allow us to have the internet in its purest and true form.
news.bbc.co.uk
economist.com
And countless webcomics...
This is what happens when you assume everyone surfs like you do.
It doesn't matter if I personaly don't visit other countries sites, I benefit from others in my country reading things from elsewhere and reporting them back to me. I see breaking news onn sites all the time from some guy who picked such and such up from a finnish/japanese/italian/whatever site, probably even on slashdot. That's the wonder of the interconnectedness of the net - if there is one guy in a forum I belong to that can read cyrillic and gets something interesting from a russian website, then everyone on my english site benefits.
If the Internet was separated by states, how much would you lose? How often do we Californians visit other states' web sites anyway? Why would anyone email someone living On The Other Side? Most of the time I don't even understand the language of other websites like whitehouse.gov, anyway. When was the last time I really needed them?
Come to think of it, why should San Francisco be connected to the rest of the Internet, anyway? It would just raise costs. I mean, all I do is order pizza from the web. It's not like I actually *need* Los Angeles or something.
I even emailed out a survey to see if there *is* anyone who lives outside of the SF Bay Area. Not a one! Every single email either said, "I live in the Bay Area," or "quit fooling around on the company intranet and get back to work."
404555974007725459910684486621289147856453481154 in hex is "You sank my Battleship?"
[GPG key in journal]
We'd have to stop using "www" for everything. I know there's no technical reason for it, but it just wouldn't seem right. As is, I almost want to replace www with wwecw in my domain.
-- I prefer the term "karma escort."
would someone please think of the rich Nigerian Princes that need our help to keep their hundreds of thousands of dollars in tact? What would they do without us?
So, you want to segregate the world even more than it already is? What purpose could this possibly serve, other than, well . . . what purpose could this possible serve?
Oh, I see. It would make it that much easier for China, Afghanistan, Iraq, the U.S., to censor the web, and for the search engines to 'comply with local laws'. No more worries about those pesky offshore human rights websites showing up in your search results.
I can see two groups of people being in favor of such a ridiculous idea: One, domain registrars. A dot com site is no longer enough. Now you have to have a dot us, AND a dot co dot uk, AND a dot ru, AND a dot ca, well, you get the idea. And a special fee to be allowed to mirror your site. Big bucks.
Two, governments, for all the obvious, information limiting reasons.
Assinine.
Though I'm totally opposed to regionalizing the Internet, I wouldn't mind if steps were taken to break it into smaller, localized communities so the feelings of the BBS days could be brought back. To this day I still telnet into an old local BBS . . .
There was a time when you actually knew half the people you were communicating with on-line in real life.
If the US cut itself off from the rest of the world not much would change. Lots of neat stuff happens out here and we tend to communicate in English (no the US subset of English) because it gives us a common language. Of course we foreigners tend to be bi-lingual too.
I think we would have less sick porn, less spam and less hate talk too.
Oh and you can keep Australia.
realkiwi
This is such a typical comment by an American.
You think that your country is the whole world, and that everyone agrees with you, the US is tops, and that EVERYONE reading an English site is an American.
Well, I've got news for you, there are a LOT of people that read sites from other countries.
I, for example, am in Japan right now, reading Slashdot. I'm a Canadian, and I frequently read sites from Canada, and even the US.
Do you not think that many of the immigrants in the US read sites from other countries? What about people travelling to other countries? Studying languages? Do you really think that only a tiny minority fall into one of these categories?
One of the great things about the Internet is that it can facilitate communication between people from different countries.
To talk about making it "regional" is missing the point.
All you have to do is make a back door that requires a 8192-bit RSA private key to use. Even if you knew it was there, you wouldn't be able to exploit it.
Even simpler, store a SHA-256 hash of some random very long (~30 chars) password. The back door would only work if someone gave the program that exact password, and brute forcing it would be essentially impossible.
Melissa
"Screw Sun, cross-platform will never work. Let's move on and steal the Java language." - Visual J++ Product Manager
Our President definitely can vote while in office. A president can even vote for themselves for reelection while in office.
They even show on TV when the President votes in a major election.
Melissa
"Screw Sun, cross-platform will never work. Let's move on and steal the Java language." - Visual J++ Product Manager
Wow,
... so ? I don't know. If you think that America is the "good way" for everything, well, ok. You probably think also that Darwin was wrong and that we should still only teaching that god is the origin for everything ?
: Everything the whole world has to offer.
I just don't know why I screw up some time answering that, but whatever, a debate is a debate.
The Internet is not just for googleling a search or visiting some web pages. Just think about companies that uses the Internet to connect to VPNs internationally for businesses reasons or don't you have any friends that live in Canada or in Europe ?
Just living w/ our own culture is
What will you loose
Do you visit sites from other countries: Everyday I search on Google !
Open up your mind a little bit. That's awful. Following this idea, let's remove all books that are not from USA from our libraries. We would probably be able to re-write everything to make our people dumber ?
What a shame.
What a bad idea.
What a pure US-self-centric-egocentric-stupid ideology.
But to tell the truth. If the Internet would go "regional", maybe it would be better for other countries, 90% of the crap like SPAM ("Enlarge your Penis" email type) or sex sites comes from the US. We would keep our own shit for us instead of poluting the rest of the world.
I publish an open source package. Here in Europe. Too bad you wouldn't be able to get it. (You expect me to snail-mail a CD to someone in the other regions? HAHAHA!)
Similarly, I get (open source) software/updates from all over the place, and mirroring again isn't an option.
Well, this is a definitely typical american approach. "Let's seperate from the rest of the world, because there is no rest of the world, other than what needs conquering or destroying". Time and time again, I read that the people from the US have absolutely no clue that there are other countries in the world than the gold old US, those bastards Canada, and those illegals Mexico. Oh, and the commies in Cuba and the rest of the world.
But I won't continue on the above subject, and just answer your questions:
- How often do you email people in other countries? Daily. My best friend emigrated, and another friend lives in Au. My in-laws live on a seperate continent, and my wife's best friend in China. Segregation would SUCK!!!
- How often do you use foreign sites? Considering you probably mean non-us-sites, daily. Just in case (god forbid) you mean sites foreign to me, daily. This includes sites in English, Japanese, dutch, german, french, swedish, norwegian, tagalog, russian, etc. If it has content I can decipher and find relevant, I read it.
- What would you lose by not being able to access US sites? Not considerably much, just slashdot, gucomics, google, userfriendly, various news sites, digg, etc. Oh....those are my most used sites....well, considerable apparently.
- What other processes? Well, how about those mmorpg's? If segregation was done, Blizzard would be destroyed. No more WOW, except for US, which would mean about a approximate drop of 4 million users. Many MANY games would be unable to be sold, because they rely on US servers for checking of licenses. Those games that do get sold are extremely expensive, because the sellers have to place servers in EVERY country.
- foreing news? Duh, I don't trust single access to news. Too easy to get biased views. Better to see the news from several unrelated sites, to get the whole picture, as far as that's possible.
- would journalists be hindered? Absolutely. They wouldn't be able to send their reports to their bosses, because there would be no internet connection to the US. Also, they would find themselves easier censored by the countries they are in, or report to.
So, to get back to how much would you lose......I think, if you read the things above, you'd get quite a good picture about how much you'd lose. Basically, you'd lose the internet, and everyone would be back to the 80's. No news, no webshops, no online games, high cost of games (higher than now), massive amounts of untracable piracy, rampant virusses (slowly spreading, but unable to remove due to lack of virusupdates), buggy operating systems (no updates).
Would you like it?
Then the rest of the world would be completely protected from this kind of nitwit US-Centric ideas.
And I know just the way to implement this too: We only allow American websites to visit .us domain websites!
That's regional right?
Don't worry, it's all just 1's and 0's anyway...
April Fool's is still three days away..
Don't worry, it's all just 1's and 0's anyway...
Well, I'm an American that lives in Norway. I read news regularly in English, Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, Spanish, and German. Occasionally, I read in Arabic (which I'm learning now), Hebrew, and French.
If you want news in your own language, there's nothing that stops you from reading just in your language. Google even offers the ability to limit search results based on a language. But there are many of us, for example that majority of the world outside America and England that can read and does read more than one language.
What you're really asking is, what benefit is there to Americans to stay connected to the rest of the world. And I'll give a few examples.
1) With CNN, BBC, and MSNBC being the propaganda machines they are, you have a chance to read about issue in the world from an outside perspective. Instead of trusting CNN to interview people in Iraq regarding the current crisis, you can instead read news from Iraq (much of it is in English) where you can learn what the people themselves believe is going on. From this you may have the education to vote for a political leader that has the ability to respond appropriately and profitably to both sides if one ever exists.
2) You can have access to an open and free market. The Internet is the first truly open market. It is the first time that Americans can become aware of items available outside of America and buy from these people. Or if you're a true American that buys your (German run, Canadian built) American Chrysler vehicle, you can use this opportunity to sell your products abroad and attempt to horde the income from these products for the American people alone.
3) You can send a political message around the world. For example, the majority of the world doesn't understand the need for individuals to own their own guns. They think it's an American cowboy thing. If you visit the NRA website, you learn that the NRA was founded to assist in providing a militia for the American people when an organized military was not enough to handle all their needs. What you can't learn is the reasoning for the NRA being in existance today. You could use the opportunity to state your opinion why you think it should not only be legal for everyone to have a gun, but in your opinion why it is that the world would be a safer place if everyone in the world had a gun.
4) You can read the blogs from people on Thailand that were devastated by the storms which all the Americans rallied to send money and assistance for. You can learn which charities helping to relieve these people to send money to... for example you might read "My family is truly greatful to the Red Cross for helping us to find shelter and food during this time of crisis".
5) Or you can start your own business that outsources the cheap American labor to rich countries around the world where salaries are much higher and cheap labor isn't readily available. After all, there aren't too many other countries that can advertise "Thanks to the American government stifling competition by implementing an obscenely low minimum wage, we can offer educated english literate workers at a low rate of only $6.50/hr" or whatever minimum wage is. This insultingly low salary which allows an employer to say with a paycheck "You mean so little to me, that if the American government would legally allow me to pay you less, I would". You can advertise all over the place, "We pay our employees 10 cents an hour over minimum wage to give them the feeling that they're truly appreciated and then we can milk them for overtime".
The fact is, your isolationist attitude is exactly why America needs the world wide internet. After all, if you didn't have it, then after I've replied to this story, you wouldn't be able to respond to my insults and I wouldn't be able to read your response.
P.S. - To all the non-idiots reading this reply, please respect that I am in fact simply responding to the poster's flame bait with a reponse equally as stupid as the original posting. I recognize the insults in the article and take offense to them myself, especially every time I hear them. I also would like point out that I also recognize the paradox regarding my closing statement.
Whats the point?
Please tell me this message was supposed to be posted next saterday.
It would indeed be an excellent April Fool's day joke, given how many people seriously reply to this. Of course it can not be serious. It's surprising however that no-one realizes that this must be joke. If the poster had given the similar silly argument "we should abandon all airplane flights -- after all, who ever needs to ever visit people in other states, or -heaven forbid- other countries", then I think the joke would be too obvious.
Actually, given the many serious replies, it makes makes me realize that a lot of people apparently still don't grasp what the Internet (or thinking globally) is about. If you really grok it, then the only conclussion can be that this article is a prank.
I know I'll be sorry for asking this, but up until the last word, I agreed with the poster completely, but then he lost me. I unfortunately must know what the hell "Tubgirl" is before agreeing 100%
Yeb Tvayu Matsh! Just because you live in a ango-centric cubicle doesn't mean we do! I browse sites on four continents in at least three and a half languages per day! Limit the net by region and you have just missed the whole point of the darn thing.
Unbelievable ! The post shows exactly why so much people
outside of the US blame americans for this "couldn't care
less about everything else" attitude. Do you really believe
everybody is so ignorant to the rest of the world ? My native
tongue is german and yeah, I'm definitly reading non-german
websites on a daily basis. I'm browsing slashdot, most result
of google are english websites, I'm skimming through japanese
websites for ruby stuff, I'm posting to chinese and tibetian
webforums about human rights issues...
I normally don't believe the fuss about all (north) americans
being narrow-minded patriotic morons, but posts like this
always makes me wondering if there's at least some truth about
it.
Leaving aside the ironic USA-centrism in the wording of the questions, yes, as a matter of fact I do search in other languages. Or, better put, I don't restrict my searches to any particular language at all. I read eight European languages and, especially when I'm looking for an answer to a technical question, I'm as happy to find an answer in Spanish or Finnish as in English.
Google really falls down in this department. I have a ".nl" domain and as a result Google seems boosts pages in Dutch over more relevant pages in other languages. A useful option for Google would be to allow selection of languages (plural) in which you'd like to see results.
Or maybe we'll have to wait for the European Quaero project to solve this one...
Ever heard of this 'Linux' thing? It was originally developed by a European. If the internet would've been national-only, you would probably never even have heard of Linux (and probably, neither would the Europeans- after all, what is Linux without GNU?) IMNSHO, the international nature of the internet is exactly what gives it its added value.
I feel disturbed by the often-seen attitude of North Americans of looking no further than their own coutry. Stop that already; it is exactly joining forces that makes this world a better place.
Visit http://ringbreak.dnd.utwente.nl/~mrjb/growingbettersoftware to download your free copy of the book
I sell a fly fishing game online and half of my customers are outside of the US.
-J.R.
I agree. I wouldn't hesitate in saying that regionalizing the internet would constitute the largest destruction of current and potential future knowledge in the history of civilization because of:
1) Loss of cooperation
2) Isolation of knowledge leading to its duplication
3) Stagnation of specialist knowledge
4) Promotion of other knowledge-destroying agents, like software patents
What this highlights is the need for international treaties that forbid short sighted politicians from legislating to this effect in specific countries.
Why to divide the internet by geographical boundaries?Geographical boundaries are somehow held only because we are used to them. It is a completely new world.
I think that there will be some boundaries on the internet, some analogy to "real world" states, unions, federations, republics ... But they will not be geographically based, but "intellectualy" based. That is, people will, well they actually are, group by interests, projects, workgroups, communities, language... New groups will be created, some will die, some will merge. Within larger groups with intensive life, policies will start to emerge. Similary roles of people within communities will emerge as well: some will be respected, some will have various kinds of powers, some will have to respect others. As the communities would like to keep their integrity, "boundaries" will emerge.
If there are going to be geographical boundaries on the internet, then they are going to be not natural - forced by local governments.
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.
I used to block Email from Korea and China to get rid of spam, but most of it these days is coming from the US. The Great Firewall of China is blocking most of the internet (inbound) anyway.
Taiwan is only needed for drivers for that cheap'n'cheerful motherboard.
I only ever shop in the UK.
I email a few people in France, although come to think of it, their servers are in England.
#include <sig.h>
I'd have to spend a ton of time redoing all my links to news sites in various countries and that doesn't even count various fora, blogs, and information/download sites. Every night I start in Russia and work my way around the globe. The only two regions I don't hit are Africa (except Egypt) and South America. Well, I suppose you can add Antartica to that list as well. I'm a total news junkie ;-).
"[I]t is a wise man who admits the limits of his knowledge or skill, and that pretending either causes harm." --Terry Go
This article made me angry. For me (I'm Swiss), it shows that most Americans
- are arrogant
- ignore minorities
- don't know they are a minority themselves
- are selfish in a way that hurts themselves and they don't know it
- forgot the history of America
- think America is Paradise
- would probably elect Bush again
- are therefore really, really stupid
I don't even want to go on details, because I guess a Real American
woudn't even care to discuss and try to understand why this is so.
This arrogance is the reason why America loses power and respect
in the rest of the world.
What comes first in my mind :
- KDE (mainly german)
- Anjuta (lead programmer is Indian FWIK)
- The Shadowrun RPG website (German IIRC)
- MPlayer (Hungarian)
- A lot of O.V. Anime
There are surely other things but that is the first things I thought of. Ah yes, another bit, a bit stretched, I admit it : Linux. Without access to a global community, the Finnish Mr Torvalds would never have completed his freaky project.
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
Is this some kind of trick question or something?
... Gosh, I want 1993 back. With todays hardware that is. :-)
What bedazzles me time and time again is that computer geeks and supposed experts get all worked up when it comes to "who controlls the internet" and "cutting of certain parts of the internet". Hello? Anybody at home? I got some bad news for you: You are all cut off! I've got the internet right here on my Linux box and I just took it offline. HA! Take that! I'll take an Euro from each of you before you're allowed back on.
Seriously, these discussions are so super pointless it hurts. The internet is a bunch of copper/glasfiber in the ground and some root servers somewhere connecting a large amount of computer users who've come to agree upon using the same TCP/IP Domain Space. Period. It's as regionalized as you want it to be, at any given time. Or do you mean if like china would suddenly sever all it's wires or - more elegantly - reconf it's root-servers, leave the mutual TLD Space and implement it's own. Or shut down all TCP/IP stuff and force it's citizens back to todays eqivalent of BBS Networks and FidoNet Variants? Well, then you'd have to connect to chinese online info via dialup. Untill someone sets up an effective gateway that pulls and pushed content to and from the non-internet(s) on a regular basis that is. Which would take something like 30 minutes for it to happen.
NOBODY controlls the internet. Not very effectively anyway. And nobody can be 'cut off'. Whatever that means. If anybody controls this mutual, unwritten agreement that lead to the net of networks, it's the corporations making bucketloads of cash from supplying the infrastructure for all this. And they shure as hell have no interest in forcing paying customers back into an updated version of the Fidonet or something like that, away from the big service providers into a more distributed, redundant and less error prone network. People might get used to it. Remember the signal-to-noise ratio on the Fido and MausNet? It was so good, people didn't even want anonymity back then. You don't even get that type of quality on ancient, well established hermetric community sites like slashdot these days. Give me super-strict unified document markup, standardized strong-encrypted private messaging and standardized sandboxed rich client technology (offline if you will) and I'd even welcome a more regionalized network rather then the sad and sorry mess we have to deal with nowadays! Ancient protocolls, additionally totally f*cked-up by de-facto standard crap-clients in the hands of the clueless, a gigantic corporation that has spoiled the whole expierience for years, maybe even decades to come by means of millions of PC users unable to grasp the crappines of Outlook, IE, Netscape 4 and the need for computer security, etc.,etc. Don't even get me started on Spam and the havoc clueless politicians are wrecking with new "internet laws". It makes me weep just thinking of it.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
A fair chunk of the useful stuff currently on the Internet is in the US.
A fair chunk of the Internet's users are in the US.
Development of pretty much every major OS is based wholely or partly in the US.
Development of pretty much every major browser is based wholely or partly in the US.
Development of many important web standards is based wholely or partly in the US.
This question is being posed by someone in the US. They might not miss the rest of the world, but the rest of the world might think differently.
Believing something doesn't make it true. Not believing something doesn't make it false.
I'm Germany born, raised, and living, but about 90% of web stuff I read is at least English, and probably mostly US content.
I wouldn't want a regionalized web, unless it'd offer me the same international connectivity as now (and why wouldn't it, exactly?).
Regionalised Internet would be just a phase in rebuilding it again as peer-to-peer connected confederation of national networks. I guess it would become a lot like international telephone network - the location of servers would be explicit, prefixed or suffixed with country ID, not "virtual" like today. Each country would be forced, in a way, to complete national network graph and interconnect all local ISPs. The borders would arise, customs boots (firewalls/gateways) will be placed and perhaps the customs taxes imposed on traffic of intangible goods. It will be shocking return to reality - unlike The Internet, The World is not one, not yet and perhaps even will not ever be. Now The World wants to reshape The Internet to its own image (and the other way around, too, but The Internet does not have real, direct power). Nevertheless, those countries who keep their Internet connected, open and unrestricted, will have huge advantage in development and economy over those who strangle it in order to squeeze money out of it, or to prevent social changes. Whenever there is worth going from point A to point B and from point B to point A, the jurisdictions of A, B or both will want their cut in it, probably under excuse of "assuring national security and souvereignity, protecting the innocent, ... etc.". Restricting access and traffic is one of the oldest known means to do so.
How about commerce? The US might think it does not need other countries, but it does want to SELL stuff to them. And selling and the Internet go hand in hand nowadays.
Does the question remind anybody else of E.A.Poe's "The Mask of Red Death?" That is, let's wall ourselves in, we don't need the barbarians (from Greek, orig. meaning "foreigner") anyway?
If the internet was regionalised, interest in it would simply start to disappear, particularly outside the US; accessing US sites is basically what I do with the internet. Playing games hosted in the US. Talking to people who live in the US. Skype would die quickly, since their greatest appeal is bypassing the cost of international phone calls. IM services which basically do the same thing would take a huge hit. ISPs would die by the thousand outside the US, as the total content accessible by the Internet would go down 50% or more, depending on country. Amazon.com, ThinkGeek and pretty much anyone who sells through the web would lose money from this, more or less, since a good part of their revenue comes from overseas buyers.
Even worse, people would lose contact with friends and relatives in other countries. Spam wouldn't go down; most of the spam I get is originated in the US. The Internet would simply wither and die on several countries that haven't developed a strong internet culture; that includes most of the world. Private companies would start running their own international gateways. Wikipedia would take a huge hit and lose all of its non-english language versions. Open Source software would take a huge hit as well; numerous idiotic IP laws in the US stop some software from being distributed there, and worse, numerous crucial programmers in numerous important projects would simply disappear from the network and have to fork their own regional versions which would quickly become incompatible as Open Source died outside the US and nearly disappeared inside it. Slashdot would lose at least 25% of its readers. The Internet's main corporate use (Connecting offices between different countries and saving millions worth of international calls and mail in the process) would suddenly disappear, and any interest in it (And custom applications) would go away too. Computers as a whole would become immensely less useful, and become a niche market again in some countries. Software would be put back years by the change as everything shifts to the closed-source development model, which would be more viable.
I probably missed some of the consequences. My point is, don't go there, man.
I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: "O Lord, make my enemies ridiculous." And God granted it.
This is redicilous. Isn't half the joy of the internet that there are no boundaries and no borders? People from all over the world united. Well, its a nice thought anyway *cof* china *cof*.
Google on "tank armor" and my site pops right up. I spend a lot of time researching tank technology, especially composite armors, both online and in print. Much of my effort is spent on Russian, Ukranian, and German websites, patent filings, and company brochures. The International Journal of Impact Engineering is great when I can get it, but there's a wealth of information to be mined from analyzing the latest German innovations, or the flood of ex-Soviet designs previously hidden behind the iron curtain, now revealed to the west for the very first time.
German defense engineers are masters of the composite armor arrangement. Being a western country, they have access to highly precise fabrication facilities and the most advanced technical materials money can buy, and they have the money to buy it. Seeing what they buy, how they shape it, and how much they put where is invaluable to my interests.
Russia and Ukraine, on the other hand, faced the prospect of fighting NATO on a shoestring budget. Their materials were modest, and they couldn't rely on their manufacturing facilities to consistently produce high-precision machining of components, but their engineers were (and continue to be) top-notch. They accepted the limitations of the materials and tools they had to work with, and found ways to arrange relatively humble metals, ceramics, and plastics such that they synergistically produced very advanced composite armor effects. They designed their armor systems such that they would continue to provide high levels of protection even if the factory mass-producing them couldn't weld a straight line to save their lives. While engineers in the west pushed the limits of what factories were capable of producing, often with disasterous results (qv the failed joint German/American MBT-70 project) their eastern counterparts made damn sure their own designs could be churned out quickly, cheaply, and in vast numbers (exceptions like the T-64/T-80 family notwithstanding). This holds special appeal to me because these are armor effects that can be replicated in a humble home workshop, using inexpensive commodity plastics and ceramics. If I don't measure it perfectly well, or the edges don't line up quite right, hey! It still works! That is more valuable to me than some super-advanced design that would take $1000/lb and a bunch of unobtainable federal licenses before I could even consider putting tab A into slot B.
Besides lots of oil, orphans, and bodybags, one of the things Americans found in our latest tragic military misadventure was a bunch of tanks which had been upgraded with armor modules purchased from Russia and welded into place in Iraq. These modules had been encountered in the 1991 war, but for some reason detailed analysis of these modules' composition didn't see the light of public attention until now. These "Enigma" armor modules repeatedly resisted the shaped charge warheads of Dragon and Milan anti-tank missiles and the depleted uranium projectiles issuing from 30mm Bushmaster autocannons, though they did not fare so well against Abrams' 120mm main guns. Still, that's not bad at all for a relatively lightweight steel box welded onto the turret of a forty year old tank (the T-55). Enigma modules were pried loose and cut open, and do you know what was found inside? Simple layers of steel, natural rubber, and construction-grade aluminum, with airgaps between each three-layer array. Some boxes were missing a layer or two here and there, and the adhesion between layers was sloppy at best. This was an example of the soviet bulging armor, doing what it does best, on the cheap. The effect this combination produces belongs in the realm of rocket science, but putting the boxes themselves together hardly takes a highschool diploma.
American armor engineering s
That question is not to be dealt with by its content at all.
It is just another example of their ego-centrism -- don't take it serious and move on.
Nobody is likely to lose anything - it is the fundamental nature of the internet that you can communicate across network boundaries. I don't understand why some people seem to be too boneheaded to just accept the fact, that all we are talking about is a strife about who gets to decide what the top level domains are and how they are administrated. In the very worst case we could have a situation where one domain name resolves to many IP addresses depending on which DNS server you query. That would be annoying, and it would probably cause enough problems for some businesses that it would be sorted out in the end.
/.
The scenario that is described would require whole regions to be somehow confined behind a single switch or firewall - not bloody likely, if you ask me. Not even China have achieved anything like that, and they are supposed to be the world leaders in this kind of thing, if one is to believe the squabbling crowds of parrots on
No, the real isolation and fragmentation on the internet comes from what in your head - or rather what's not in your head, namely knowledge about the world around you. Example - because English has traditionally been so widely used, most native English speakers have felt little incentive to learn other languages - as the original post illustrates. Everybody else on the internet, however, know not only their own language, but are reasonably fluent in English and read articles in both English and their native languages; thus they are likely to have a much wider knowledge and outlook than eg. Americans. This is going to hurt both England and USA more and more in the future - just think about how hard it is for American companies to establish themselves in China; they have to hire expensive experts in Chinese language and culture. On the other hand, the Chinese already speak English - a Chinese company doesn't have that hurdle to overcome if they want to establish themselves in the US; all in all, they have easy access to the colossal Chinese market, and they can go right out in the world and take on the international community as well.
Surely what makes the internet so great is that its completly international. Would be a bit stupid to split it up.
For these reasons:
1) it shows how some people think about the rest of the world.
2) it shows the craziness of todays world; economic leaders push for globalization, while political readers push for isolation.
3) it shows how much ignorance there is.
4) it shows that the internet is the biggest invention ever. The internet is the best medium to help spread democracy around the globe, and politicians fear the internet because it will bring true democracy on the table, once everyone is connected.
5) it shows a profound lack of understanding about development processes (not only in computers, but in every other sector as well).
6) it shows a distinct lack of knowledge of basic economics.
Questions like these are eye openers...
It's a largely un-talked about fact that the US is a multilingual country made up in part of immigrants with more than one language. If we regionalized the internet, it would encourage the US internet to separate from other countries, and encourage a monolingual internet due to the power structures in place. I'm not saying that it WILL do this, but considering the fact that the vast majority of those people who are in power speak only English, and those who make decisions for citizens about media, industry, advertising, entertainment are generally among the white, monolingual majority, I'm sure that if we regionalized the internet and cut the country off from other countries, it would worsen the problem of minority alienation--only this time it wouldn't be in the economic or employment or education sectors. It would be in the electronic sectors.
"The last, best, hope"
You may think me a tired, old, cynic. I'd have to disagree about the tired bit.
Well, this would be the end of the world wide interoperability and it'd make it easier for some local governments to apply free speech restrictions. Today only China has enough money to do that effectively.
:)
:)
Personally, I'm French but I do live in Germany and work for an American company. I use 99% of the time Internet in English and browse sites which are mainly hosted in the US. I mostly use internet for work related topics, and English is the lingua franca for programmers.
But for most of personal queries too I use American sites... I would not think about using German of French in a query, unless searching for something specific to the country, because usually the information i'd find would be more accurate in English. Movie reviews, wikipedia, technical stuff, etc... I also appreciate the news from American sites which give me a very different perspective of the news than the one I'd get from German or French medias. This was particularly interesting when you have such things as the Iraq war going on, and you can make your own opinion about what is going by accessing the propaganda of both sides
I think one way or another, most foreigners who regularly use Internet will end up using an American site or a localized version of it... You guys would have a lot of $$$ to lose if you lost this quasi-monopoly on the Net. I really think it's in the interest of the US to keep control over this kind of stuff and somehow I trust more Americans on that than Europeans technocrates...
I think in China they agree even more
A veeery looooong time ago (1995, internet bronze age, to be exact) in Germany we had a nice friendly provider called germany.net (later renamed nexgo.de, then bought by large provider arcor.de) which actually offered FREE internet access (minus phone dialin costs, of course) at a time when other providers were still charging ~ $5/hour! (I first went on the internet when Compuserve Germany went below $15/hour, since that was my magical pain limit when I was a pupil) ...). Later on IIRC they offered non-German content to premium users and soon freed it up entirely. germany.net was a real pioneer at that time, I'm still very, very thankful for their service!
"Problem" was that this germany.net internet access was exactly what the name said - Germany-only. Which was ok initially since there were obscure ways to access foreign-national content (FTP mail,
I don't remember too many details about the limitations of Germany-only service, but with large file servers in Germany offering many international things (full-scale mirroring) it wasn't too painful actually.
On both counts. Im dead serious.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Dumbass
"Physics is to math as sex is to masturbation." -R. Feynman
My daily browsing is about 50% *.us, 25% European, 25% *.jp websites. What's more, I'm currently reading /. from Japan. Would such a change mean no more /. overseas? Perhaps there would be regional mirrors that are synced every so often, with the people who own the borders charging some fee to let data through?
Bad idea, I say. Americans aren't exposed to enough of the world as is that quarantining them further could possibly have a good effect. If anything, I imagine they'd become even less hesitant to offend the rest of the world than they already are.
Legalize it.
No, Mexico is part of a Spanish-language speaking region, and not part of the particular English-language region the US belongs to.
If your criteria were simply native language you could easily find quite a far parts of the US belong in the "Spanish North America Region" (which also includes Cuba). Then you've got the issue as to if the the rest of the US is it's own region or if it can be put with most of Canada and Belize as "English North America".
I'm outside the US and use both British and US services for my business - for clients residing outside the U.S. who also need access to the English-speaking network. Also, closing off country-specific space is the internet equivalent of economic protectionism, raising bariers to a teaming online economy - think of the outsourcers!
1. Will this work like actual region separation. i.e an INDIAN citizen working in USA would he have free access to both INDIA and USA internet regions ? 2. Also since most of the message boards and contributions and FAQ sites and manuals were written by teams comprising of members from various countries what will be accessed by whom ? Take for example the PHP manual, it was written by programmers from many countries. so which region does the php website and documentation belong ?
Chris ,
Php Programmers.
The Network Effect would be reduced. The internet would lose traction. The Internet promotes international co-operation and understanding. The Internet will do more for World Peace in the next 20 years than the UN did in half a century.
Don't assume that everybody posting in the English language Internet is American/Canadian/English.
What too loose is the first question.
First of all the opportunity to read such stupid questions.
What to gain is the second question.
First of all the opportunity to read such stupid questions.
Solution: deploy the great firewall of china to us borders so people like the poster could be kept safe from foreign information. We must protect such people from the influence of what goes on in other countries, their view of the world could be harmed. They might begin to understand what other people thinks and question them self a such thing should be forbidden.
Best Regards Rune
I created my own internet six years ago. We have a nameserver down by the stairs, public mail servers in the basement and some malicious botnets in the attic.
It's fully evolved, and by the time the rest of you have died painfully in the post-nuclear winter, I will be surfing safe and sound in my very home.
You see, regionalization won't save your ass. You're done for and fried.
In the year 4000 my descendants will have spread my net to the entire globe and your puny plans will FAIL! (Since 1 net will be 1 region, so there would be no sense talking about regions.) I call it Web 4000.
It's based on *nix, but I have a few Windows boxes to account for the x factor.
All my children passed the Turing test at the age of three.
So the question you must ask yourself is not whether you'd lose something from a regionalized Internet, but how much you can donate to my project (I use PayPal) to save a seat for your seed in the New Era.
It's never too late to give up!
Defining Statistics and Social Research
I'm often looking for China vendors for electronic components (mostly resistor, relays, capacitors, stuff like that, rarely ICs) since we manage contract assemblers in China and Taiwan. We also have an office in Hong Kong and Shanghai.
Segregating the web would change how I find parts, plus the email thing to Asia. I'm sure that we'll find a work-around, but it will have a negative impact on how we do business.
Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Albert Einstein
I don't think its going to happen.
Your idea is just great! Now, how about going a step further and create a bunch of small "very local internets" that would not be connected to each over? Each company could have its own. We could call that ... I don't know ... "intranets", maybe? Oh wait! I have an even better idea! We could just *disconnect* all machines and just have the job done locally! Or even, even better: we could stop using computers!! Now, that sounds great! And as for mail exchange ... hmm ... what about printing the documents and sending them in form of paper? Oops, I forgot, we don't have computers anymore. But, hey, we could *write* these documents by hand, using some kind of writing device. Or, for faster communication, I was thinking about a system that could send electrical signals over cables. You know, we could build some sort of code with combinations of short and long signals! That would probably sound funny -- something like "dih daaah dih daaah daaah daaah" ... hehehe -- but I'm sure that could actually work! Or wait ... what about smoke signals??
I read BBC and other foriegn news services too, but I use foriegn websites the most when I am planning a trip oversees. There are great local websites for tourist offices, small hotels, parks, etc. Many are in the local language, but with the aid of the nice web page translators you can get an idea of what you are looking at.
I know when I was planning a trip to Italy recently, that I used an Italian hotel search engine, and I used the Italian Rail website to find train times and prices.
Regional internet is stupid and I hope it never comes to pass.
Sounds like it back to the old days of bbsing. Anyway whose going to decide upon the regions, will it be via countries, by cultures, by religion, by governments? via whatever. It could get ridicules and basically it would not be the www anymore.
I'm not sure this is anything more than a troll article or a quick generator of comments for a sociology thesis on xenophobia, but assuming it's sincere, what would be the benefit?
What possible gain (other than someone figuring out how to provide tollgate access across regions - think DVD) would there be for the end users?
Spam reduction? They'd redistribute before the ribbon was cut.
Address space? No longer a real problem, just coming slowly.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
I see here a lot of bullets about how we'd lose this, or that, or the other thing, or everything - but what exactly would we gain beyond some bandwidth? What's worth sectioning off the internet so severely? Quite frankly, it's a giant step backwards. No sane organization would do such a thing.
As an artist..
Sometimes working with Blender cheers up life, mostly when it works, and I like to talk a lot on IRC, to get help or help others, or just talk, and most of these people (like 95%) are not Italy-residents. There are like 5 tutorials total that are actually somewhere in Italy, out of a pretty big number, thus -forget about learning-...
CGtalk.com and CGartists.com looks to be a USA based website.. how could I live without it?
As a programmer..
I work with many people that are living in USA, Finland and Germany... Python for one is not hosted in Italy, nor is the Free Pascal Compiler, so it would mean no way to update the system (unless people imported it from the netherlands..), most guides are in USA and other European countries. Italy is really poor on the web..
As a person..
I have lived in USA for 3 years, so I have a lot of friends there, also since I'm Russian I like to talk to people in Russia..
As a student..
Physics! What the hell do Italians know about physics...? Programming? Just about nothing.... there are sooo few Italian websites it's a shame.
Wikipedia is my best friend, and seems to be a not Italian-Resident (Ok, maybe it.wikipedia.org is, but check how many Articles(then also check how much each article got) it got, and compare to en.wikipedia.org)
Slashdot.org is USA based website, and I get all my news from it. Means I would be dis-informed and all that...
All in all...
If I was to be restricted to only browse Italian websites, I'd just move to USA for the websites, or/and join a group of hackers to try to break the GreatFireWall...
.... WE SHALL FIGHT!! L33TS, TO ARMS!!!!
http://naerey.switch-case.org
Comment removed based on user account deletion
first of all:
Having internet domains is just an adresss for a machine.
What really counts is language diversity. It it a disadvantage when you are unable to read foreign languages and language diversity benefits those who are able to take part in different discourses.
As a German I often know more than English-only authors as I am able to read English and German and some French and I mostly read German online media which is in general richer and better than english It media. No english IT media beats Golem and Heise. so I get an advantage as I am able to read both and an english only author is able to read only english content.
I mean come on - regionalized Internet - what don't you get about the internet? Like how it's made the global community that much smaller (in terms of virtual distances between disparate cultures and regions)? Personally, I visit foreign websites pretty much ever day. Even though I live in Canada I buy most of my music from Germany, I play an online game hosted on London England, but the developers are in Iceland. I talk to people in Serbia, Sweden, Israel... ...someone needs to bonk this guy with a clue-by-4. Globalization in the economic sense may not be a great thing, but globalization in a community/cultural sense - the sharing between people of different cultures and widely separated communities brought together instantaneously via the internet is a "good thing".
Going on means going far
Going far means returning
You could try Le Monde or La Vanguardia for starters. English may be the lingua franca of the Internet, but there are plenty of sites out there that use other languages. IHMO, easy access to other languages and cultures is one of the best things about the Internet, and I would be loath to give it up.
"Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past." -- George Orwell
I don't usually make a habit of digging into the contact info for sites I visit to discover what country they're in. For all I know 90% of the sites I visit might be outside the US. Very few companies still use country TLD. The bulk of the world's sites end in .com/.org/.net and most of them aren't in the US.
/..sig file not found - permission denied.
About 50% of traffic for my chess website is from outside the US. It's pretty common for someone to send me an e-mail on bahalf of another user because the other user doesn't speak english.
> If the internet was separated into regions, how much would you lose?
Too much, the world is no longer a number of separated entities living together, it's a single entity with a few demarcations called countries.
> How often do you visit other countries' web sites?
Everyday
How often do you e-mail people in other countries?
Everyday
> Do you ever search in a language other than English, and if you do, how often does it turn up foreign vs domestic sites?
Half and half, depending on what you call "domestic". For me, domestic means worldwide.
> What would foreigners lose by not being able to visit US-hosted sites, and how quickly would they be able to recreate what they lost?
They will loose access to the largest part of the Internet (in terms of content creation). It's unlikely that content will be recreated: it's a symbiosis.
> What other process that we are not normally aware of depend on a borderless internet?
Not much, other than Knowledge exchange... and minor things like trade.
> I find that although I often read in-depth news about other countries, the sites I get that news from are usually hosted in USA, and I only bother to read in English.
And most people in the World speak, or at least can read, English.
> Would the Americans who report world news be hindered by a segregated internet, or do they already have the means to overcome such barriers?
All media outlets will have a hard time reporting what's going on in other places/countries.
> How much more expensive and complicated would it be to access sites outside of 'your' internet, and how much slower would it be?
Depending on the implementation, it would range from a minor annoyance (i.e: change your DNS server) to impossible (filters at ISP level). Are you thinking China? You better think dictators (Cuba, Venezuela, Korea and the like). Segregation is already happening in the Internet world.... just when we thought we could be free.......
/.
Well (1) if you don't write/chat/talk to people from other countries this is a problem of yours. I used to e-mail/chat with people from everywhere. Well (2) in terms of percentage, US is onlny a small part of the whole world. If Internet was split US probably had just a small part of it.... Chinese really don't speak english at all, and they could have the same desire like you have, but they are erven 5 time more then american. We italians (a part from some people who speak english) are not interested in english written websites. I can expect the same is for french, spanish or german people. Even if I can write/spreak english I do not really CNN online, becase I am not really interested of what you're doing in your country. That's why I prefer reading italian news. At the same time I can have the opportunity to read at CNN, Aljazeera and so on. At the same time we got the opportuninty to get information By the way, I really don't unerstand where the problem is. Will you have some benefit by splitting the internet? Please explain me this point.
whats the point of a global network if you're going to split it up based on physical limits/borders? YOU might not( or think you dont) use sites hosted outside the US but think again. Even better think what if, What If you traveled outside your territory and wanted to read slashdot? The technology lets you, why block it.
/. EVER - Delete this Crap.
The only incentive to doing such a thing would be for companies seeking a new industry in information transfers, where they provide you access across borders for a price.
Or if a certain government were seeking to block/control the only form of media they cant easily regulate. How is this diffrent from the great chinese firewall, you could say thats exactly what this is.
Why segment, why splinter, why create barriers, What Are You Afraid Of?
Dumbest Ask
A non-regionalized internet is essential to the development of a global democratic governance system that the world badly needs these days. Let's see. Who do I want running global business rules, labour rules, environmental rules, and human rights rules? George Bush, who runs it now through the US military, or a globally elected governance organization.
As the internet globalizes information, communications, and transactions, and organization in general, it can help lead us toward global governance of the large scale issues of our human activity.
A regionalized internet is a bastion of desperate, and losing, nationalists.
Only though global democracy can we start taking people worldwide toward an economically just, socially just, and environmentally responsible highest-common-denominator way of living. The global internet, and globalized organized, but grass-roots-level processes taking place on it, can help lead us there.
Today, we are acting at global scale, in business, and in our economic activity. Our effects are also global. Our climate warming will be global, as will oil shortages, and fresh water shortages. Our governance solutions need to become global to manage these issues. And George Bush's empire will simply not cut it.
The US needs to recognize that the rest of human society is a) out there and b) could be more of a help than a threat if the US would try to facilitate intelligently instead of acting like the ignorant and arbitrary
schoolyard bully. Global governance is happening, and it can either be wih, or without the US's cooperation.
By those nations that regionalize their internet, you'll recognize those fundamentally opposed to
global democratic governance, and you'll recognize that those are the nations whose power must be
limited to enable the new system to emerge.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
If your criteria were simply native language you could easily find quite a far parts of the US belong in the "Spanish North America Region" (which also includes Cuba). Then you've got the issue as to if the the rest of the US is it's own region or if it can be put with most of Canada and Belize as "English North America".
Wow, I'll tell my Hispanic relatives in Santa Barbara, CA, who have lived in the US since before Texas joined the Union, that they don't exist.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Porn. Lots and lots of porn.
Ryosen
One man's "Troll, +1" is another man's "Insightful, +1".
Since I am learning German, I often read German websites to hone my skills. Places such as dict.leo.org and anything with .de have been extremely useful for me in my learning process. I can't see any other reason to split up the internet than for a country to try to control the content and the people accessing that content.
There is a possibility that he'll vote the wrong way.
Y'all ain't got no sense of humor.
Kurnik.org is a great recreation site :). Highly recommended (not in work hours though).
I'd lose Google for one thing, which would be bad.
SCIREV.NET - fanfics,reviews & more
...And you should not forget that many other people in the world understand English even if it's not their official language. For example, I'm from Finland and about 90% of the browsing I do is on US servers. The content available in Finnish is a tiny fraction compared to the amount available in English, and not having the ability to pick the best-of-breed sites from each category would generally suck.
For example, there are probably hundreds of good blogging sites hosted in the US, whereas I only know one in Finnish, and the range of services it offers is pretty limited. The same applies for almost everything, and some things are not available at all in Finnish.
http://codeandlife.com
Is the internet working outside US? Really?
Ok, I understand, we have bases in other continents. they need to get to the daily baseball results.
This would be a major problem. Many companies, whether US owned or not, don't care where their server farm is located as long as it is up and it's as cheap as possible.
If you're looking at segregation by language, why not.
If you're looking at segregation by physical location, forget it. Because then you would immediately say goodbye to a whole lot of porn, online gambling, online shopping, and so on. This would also affect me personally because I live in Germany even though I'm American. Would I no longer be able to communicate via email or chat clients with my family in the States?
Just my 2.... Damn! I just realized there is no cents key on my laptop!
Wow, I'll tell my Hispanic relatives in Santa Barbara, CA, who have lived in the US since before Texas joined the Union, that they don't exist.
1.) You have some old relatives.
2.) Texas joined the US before California did. If they lived in the US before Texas joined, they must have been living in some part other than California.
How often do you visit other countries' web sites?
Daily:
BFM-TV French TV news stream.
Buzzflash regularly links to the Independent and Guardian, not to mention other papers from around the world.
I don't know where digitallyimported gets its Eurotrance stream but I'm guessing not Tulsa.
BBC and other services dropped shortwave to the First World with the understanding that internet stream would replace it.
Regional internet would be a vast retreat.
The internet is already regionalized and is increasingly becoming ever more regionalized - countries already have own domain names and The Great Firewalls are being built to control what people are allowed to see or do. It is not a question of it but a question of what is happening alone....
they lived in Texas at the time and were landowners.
hint: Americans have this radical concept called mobility. you should check it out sometime. And go learn German, our original language.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Maybe except for the ending, of course; but maybe you are right, I should strive harder to ignore this kind of comment.
/. is what it is. And it has been like this for 15 years. Now, the "disagreeing" poster was just venting off "this ask /. was shit and dumb, and every ask /. has been shit and dumb, and I don't know why I am reading this"... well, if you don't know why you are reading something, IMHO maybe you shouldn't be reading that. As another poster answered him, "please nominate a similar site that sucks less" -- and as I would complete "and post there".
/." -- and to sort out the 1:100 SNR till he finds some informative answer to his doubt (or school work, or whatever), the least I think I can do is to put up (and answer informatively if I can) or shut up.
/. just the way it is-- questionable mental sanity or not. And some of us think that the question brought by the original poster *may* be an interesting question. And maybe I felt offended by the parent post when he downplayed ... oooh I dunno.
/. ... but k5 itself is less and less about tech those days, and they make too much effort to be not-./-like -- WRT software freedom issues for instance --, so k5 is not really good for me.
But come on,
I often whine and try to warn editors about dupes -- now, THAT is dumb. But if someone took the work to effectively "ask
There is more: some of us really like
Maybe I would even like a more k5-like
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048