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 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.
I would lose access to a wonderful sweedish website.
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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.
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.
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
...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
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.
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 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
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.