Slashdot Mirror
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?"
would miss 2chan.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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?
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
No honestly, right now it is fairly hard to censor the internet, to squash voices, or to enforce any national law. If the internet was fragmented it would allow nations much more ability to mandate what is and isn't allowed in their country, (and possibly in and out of the country as well).
Isn't that what everyone is upset about with Google, Yahoo, and China? I'm not intending to sell tin-foil hats, but this seems to be a bureaucratic wet-dream when it comes to cover-ups or media control.
I believe people would discover a way to circumvent any censorship is imposed on the internet, but let's not make it easy to censor in the first place.
"Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to govern any other" -John Ada
I'll bet ya that the amount of spam in their inboxes will decrease a lot more than the amount of spam in american inboxes.
About 80% of the worlds spam comes from USA.
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.
"Since US TV tends to be completely clueless about the rest of the world,"
:-)
I don't think you need to add that rest of the world part.
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.
Actually, I'll concede I was wrong about most of the worlds spam coming from the US... but there are numerous studies indicating that the USA is responsible for more of it than any other single country.
i dont have a problem with us being cut off from the rest of the world. It woud be a good start in the right direction for the US.
You think the USA would benefit from being more isolationist?! I'm not even going to ask - you're probably a fundamental religionist or something. By the way I was *joking* before - I think the best thing about the internet is its global nature. The sooner we start to see other people from all over the world as our peers and equals, the sooner retarded things like wars will stop happening.
Homme petit d'homme petit, s'attend, n'avale
Still the most important thing is for work: I'm accessing web-site all over the world to get papers, either from University web-site or the web-sites of organizations like IEEE or ACM. Was the whole thing not put into place to help academic research? If the web would be really be split along political lines, research would be the first causality. Some of the largest online databases on genes or proteins are not in the US. Same goes for physics: the largest particle accelerator will not be in the US. Many academic projects are international, same goes for open-source projects.
news.bbc.co.uk
economist.com
And countless webcomics...
This is what happens when you assume everyone surfs like you do.