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?"
Spam (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Spam, would it diminish? (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Spam (Score:2, Insightful)
About 80% of the worlds spam comes from USA.
My first thought exactally (Score:2)
Re:My first thought exactally (Score:2)
Re:My first thought exactally (Score:2)
It woud be a good start in the right direction for the US.
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
RESPONSIBLE and SENDING are different (Score:3, Interesting)
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
Re:Spam (Score:2, Funny)
Its completely safe too! I don't get paid until you're satisfied it worked!
Just send $500 by Western Union to me here in Ukraine. In one month, once you are satisfied that the spam has stopped, tell me your confirmation number to release the money so I can pick it up!
i for one (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:i for one (Score:2)
Re:i for one (Score:3, Funny)
I pity you, and I pity me for knowing what you're talking about.
Re:i for one (Score:2)
Re:i for one (Score:2)
Sounds awesome! (Score:5, Funny)
As a programmer... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:As a programmer... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:As a programmer... (Score:5, Funny)
I recant my opposition, then.
Re:As a programmer... (Score:2)
Ubuntu www.ubuntu.com
QEMU
Most codecs...
ebay (for the JDM car parts, Yo!)
The Reg www.theregister.co.uk
5fm www.5fm.co.za (uncensored music and cool accents...)
I can't say NO loud enough.
Obviously.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Obviously.. (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm in the US and 1/2 of the stuff I use is non-US (Score:2)
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
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.
Re:A lot (Score:2, Interesting)
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
RE (Score:2)
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 counti
Google Seppuku (Score:2)
Holy (Score:2)
Arrr (Score:5, Funny)
I would lose access to a wonderful sweedish website. [thepiratebay.org]
Re:Arrr (Score:2)
Um, it's called the INTER-net for a reason... (Score:2)
Oh nothing much, except /., google, del.icio.us, megatokyo, gmail... basically every website I check.
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
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.
Re:Freedom Goes Down, Gov't Control Goes Up... (Score:2)
Re:Freedom Goes Down, Gov't Control Goes Up... (Score:2)
Re:Freedom Goes Down, Gov't Control Goes Up... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Freedom Goes Down, Gov't Control Goes Up... (Score:2)
No they're not, they won't, and they can't.
The age of purposefully building backdoors into software is long gone. If you built something that the FBI could get into, then so could anybody with enough programming knowledge to examine the binaries and deduce the functionality. All such attempts (such as, for instance, DVD encryption) has taken less than a week to reverse. It may suprise you to learn this, b
Re:Freedom Goes Down, Gov't Control Goes Up... (Score:2)
Re:Freedom Goes Down, Gov't Control Goes Up... (Score:3, Informative)
Wow, you need to lay off on the 1990 paranoid theories. Back doors into software are so easily cracked (50~100 corporate programmers versus 500~1000 skilled/curious/hobbist "lets take it apart and see how it works just for fun" programmers online) no programmer uses them anymore.
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.
I'd like at least regonailized searches (Score:2)
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 (
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.
Come on... (Score:2)
If you are disliking
I read foreign sites (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
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 in
Language (Score:2)
As for communicating with people in other countries -- every day on IRC.
Re:Language (Score:2)
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
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.
Re:Sheesh (Score:3, Funny)
If you want someone on the radical left, there's always good ol' blood and guts Robert Fisk of the Independent [independent.co.uk], also out of the UK, although you have to pay to
Re:Sheesh (Score:2)
War ain't over yet.
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
but...but... (Score:2)
-Rick
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.
Why?? (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe the next question can be: "What would we lose from getting rid of passports?"
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.
Re:Why?? (Score:2)
Don't ever want to travel overseas then? I think the OP was suggesting the US government stop issuing passports, thus preventing you from travelling outside the country.
Re:Why?? (Score:2)
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 t
Re:Why?? (Score:2)
We would lose the internet. (Score:2)
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.
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.
You're missing the whole point! (Score:5, Insightful)
Peeling the onion another layer would help (Score:2)
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.
I'd rather split the internet ... (Score:2)
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 custome
What the %^&* does that even mean? (Score:2)
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
site
Absurd question, but let's answer anyway... (Score:5, Interesting)
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!...
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.
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:Absurd question, but let's answer anyway... (Score:2, Interesting)
If you took this away from me I'd have to find something else to do with my computer skills, such as writing worms, taking down networks, and breaking auth systems every way I can. I didn't go through 10 years of study to become this expert for nothing. And I
Oh internets, how do I love thee (Score:2, Insightful)
This is not even taking into account things such as online MMO's, entertainme
Bad news for international companies (Score:2)
Re:Bad news for international companies (Score:2)
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.
My comments (Score:2)
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.
My livelihood, family and friends (Score:2)
If we lose the w
Not everyone lives in the US (Score:2)
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.
Foreigner... (Score:2, Interesting)
This
it's an oxymoron (Score:2)
Why don't we just take another step backwards and just communicate with smoke signals?
More often than I can count (Score:2)
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 migh
*facedesk* (Score:2)
First thing I can think of ... (Score:2)
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 e
We would lose just about everything (Score:2)
awful for at least 2 reasons (Score:2)
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 softw
World news in the USA (Score:2, Informative)
Read http://news.bbc.co.uk/ [bbc.co.uk] and see what you're missing.
"Regionalized" != "Airgapped" (Score:2)
In general, the
you'd lose regardless (Score:2)
These countries are smart; they know that there isn't a chance in hell that the rest of the world is going to learn
Record (Score:2)
Depends on Where You Live (Score:2)
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
Some People Apparently Think We Already Have One (Score:2)
Promote war (Score:2)
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 inex
Re:OK, what's your point? (Score:2)
You don't need to know who wants to region-code IP packets. These aren't the droids you're looking for. You can go about your business. Move along.
Re:Rediculous,Borderline nationalism (Score:2)
I've never heard that listed as a definition for Internet. The term was coined I believe by Vint Cerf, and he was using it to refer to a network of networks: internetworking.
It's inter-network as opposed to intra-network. The prefix "inter" has nothing to do with nations.
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-d