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?"
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").
I'm with you. My forums are 50% American, 50% non-American, so half of my visitors would no longer be able to post...
A major question is how something like this could even be implemented effectively. Here in the US, I used to have a job with a regional distribution center for a Swedish-owned multinational, and most internet sites identified us as browsing from Sweden (even though our traffic went through a proxy in Virginia). That meant getting lots of ad banners in Svenska, and not being able to access W's re-election website back in the 2004 campaign...
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
That's the funny thing about the internet. The internet long ago proved to me that there is no such thing as "rock bottom." No matter how far down you go, there are people at the bottom still digging, and if you keep following them, you become insensitive. Immune is too kind of a word -- insensitive is better. You don't care about the darkest parts of humanity except as a source of humor, and so you don't have the necessary outrage to try to fix those parts of us.
/b/ board is a roiling mass of vicious, callous pricks who glory in racism, violent suffering, and porn that would be truly heinous and life-wrecking if it were real. It's nothing but a place for people to thrill in poking at their lizard brain and shout "MOAR" and "zOMG!" like it's still funny and original the 3 millionth time.
4chan's
I regret visiting that website.
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!...
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.
Hear, hear! At one point, as a user in the U.S., I was unable to properly authenticate to Netscape that I was indeed a U.S. citizen and entitled to the full-encryption version banned to other countries under ITAR. So I downloaded the patch written in and available from Australia for full 128-bit encryption.
I think regionalization is a really poor idea and unworkable in most cases. By way of example, despite not being a citizen of the UK, I've seen all six episodes of The IT Crowd. At one point, I owned a region-free APEX DVD player to watch Region 2 encoded discs that are not available at all in the U.S.
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!