What Would We Lose From a Regionalized Internet? 433
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 (Score:4, Insightful)
As a programmer... (Score:5, Insightful)
Obviously.. (Score:5, Insightful)
A lot (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Freedom Goes Down, Gov't Control Goes Up... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Gain nothing, lose everything (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Sheesh QWZX (Score:3, Insightful)
Community. (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
What would I lose? (Score:4, Insightful)
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?
Holy Shit (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Bad idea (Score:2, Insightful)
Segmenting the internet geographically would be a "Very Bad Idea".
Pretty much... everything (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
University research (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Re:Holy Shit (Score:1, Insightful)
Would loose the community feeling (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Sheesh (Score:5, Insightful)
More fool you, then. It's dubious enough relying on the US media to report US news, let alone world news.
What could you possibly gain? (Score:1, Insightful)
I'm in Poland (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
Ethnocentrism (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Regular contact with offshore folks (Score:1, Insightful)
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?? (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe the next question can be: "What would we lose from getting rid of passports?"
What would foreigners lose? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
You're missing the whole point! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Why?? (Score:3, Insightful)
Now that is a good question!
A regionalized Internet is completely absurd and could only appeal to people who would like to destroy it.
But a world without passports is just like it has always been (except for the last ~ 100 years) and should be.
OK, what's your point? (Score:1, Insightful)
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.
Oh internets, how do I love thee (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
It's already segmented (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:You don't know what you got till it's gone (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Spam (Score:2, Insightful)
About 80% of the worlds spam comes from USA.
The web never was American.... (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Absurd question, but let's answer anyway... (Score:2, Insightful)
I don't think you need to add that rest of the world part.
Exactly (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:My first thought exactally (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Absurd question, but let's answer anyway... (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Sheesh (Score:3, Insightful)
From the way you talk, you sound pretty sour on life. It disturbs me because nowadays America is the country of sour, unhappy people. I see them all over the place.
Then I visit the Philippines, and everyone there has a smile and a laugh for me, even though most of them only make about 200 pesos a day [$4].
And I wonder
I hate to say it, but I think it's those of us who live here in America, land of depression.
I challenge you to prove me wrong.
D
Re:What would foreigners lose? (Score:3, Insightful)
I think of tiny niche interests (many software packages would be similar), and I am amazed at the effort many non-native English speakers provide content in English (as painful as it may be) to attract a wider audience than they might in say, Danish.
The benefit is clear: control. Everything else is clearly a looser.
Every Freaking Day (Score:1, Insightful)
economist.com
And countless webcomics...
This is what happens when you assume everyone surfs like you do.
Re:What would foreigners lose? (Score:2, Insightful)
It goes something like this; one, two, many foreighners... but that only goes for US citizens
Me however, I'm Belgian, and let's be honest, Belgium doesn't really have any kind of nationalistic feeling to it. Heck, our army even parades around with plastic rifles, I kid you not! So naturally I'm not to big on nationalism. I've always thought it's wiser to unite and compromise then to be nationalist and divide.
I know I'm probably a member a minority worldwide with that idea. Anyhow, to the point of actual discussion. I hope you've all read 1984 by George Orwell? I can almost see it happen if the internet gets regionalised, Oceania, (UK, ustralia, USA, etc) as one enourous network, the EU and eurasia as another mega network, and south east asia as a third... And groups of regional hackers trying to hack the other networks to corrupt data, steal information and so on...
Looking at the technological opportunities and the growth in them each and every day, this scenario is a possible future accordig to me at least.
Last little comment, about us foreighners going to great lenghts to publish things in English... Let's be honest about that, English is just the "Common" (sorry for the AD&D reference)of the internet. Unlike most Americans, most Europeans speak at least 2 languages.. FLUENTLY! Not the badly accented, half incromprehensible talk Americans call speaking a foreighn language. Most Europeans of smaller countries (Belgium, Finland, The Netherelands,..) will speak at least 3 languages fluently. For most of us it really is no real extra effort to write in English.
Re:Ethnocentrism (Score:2, Insightful)
I think the 'at worst' is not correct, though. At worst, others will fear (not the same as respect) or hate you. Neither of which are good things.
Isolationism is not a good policy. It results in polar, self-interested views of the world, it allows politicians to look past the individuals to the 'greater need' and finds historians talking about the benefit of hindsight - truths that America woke up to before, one December morning in 1942.