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?"

Spam

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.

i for one

would miss 2chan.

Sounds awesome!

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.

As a programmer...

with an open source project [gentoo.org] [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.

Re:As a programmer...

I'm with you. My forums are 50% American, 50% non-American, so half of my visitors would no longer be able to post...

Re:As a programmer...

Your comment just reminded me that if we did get a regionalized Internet, there would be half as many Gentoo zealots throwing plugs in unrelated topics.

I recant my opposition, then.

Obviously..

...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.

Re:Obviously..

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...

A lot

I would lose a Free operating system.

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.

Arrr

I would lose access to a wonderful sweedish website. [thepiratebay.org]

Freedom Goes Down, Gov't Control Goes Up...

For citizens oppressed countries, their ability to reach content not authorized by their government is dramatically reduced. Think the Great Chinese Firewall, but several layers deep.

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...

I very much agree. So, to add to the list:

• ssh (was for the longest time only available from abroad)
• decent encryption (hosted abroad)
• BBC (try it, better than most US news sources, ALSO regarding the US)
• Ocaml (developed and hosted in France)
• Python (I bet originally this was not hosted in the US, even though van Rossum is now at Google)
• SuSE Linux
• LOTS of open source projects
• Well, linux! Linux was started abroad.
• Email/web would instantaneously cease to be the main means of scientific communication, as there is research all over the world.
• Think at companies that do commerce or have subsidiaries offshore...

Frankly, a regional internet is a ridiculous idea, even more so that a regional phone network.

Gain nothing, lose everything

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.

Sheesh QWZX

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.

Community.

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.

What would I lose?

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

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.

I read foreign sites

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.

Pretty much... everything

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.

Sheesh

...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...

More fool you, then. It's dubious enough relying on the US media to report US news, let alone world news.

I'm in Poland

...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 :)

I know many people in Poland who are limited only to .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

BTW, what if Linus never left Finland and his ftp wouldn't be available across the ocean?

Ethnocentrism

Let me sum up all those words in the article in two questions:

1. Does anything worthwhile or of interest happen outside the USA?
2. Why should people in the USA care about the wellbeing of foreigners?

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??

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?"

What would foreigners lose?

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.

You're missing the whole point!

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.

Absurd question, but let's answer anyway...

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!...

Re:Absurd question, but let's answer anyway...

I'm in a similar situation. I'm a swiss post-doc researcher in Japan. For day to day information (weather, maps, etc) I access of course, japanese web sites. I read blogs and news in three langages (english, french, german), with each langage spanning multiple countries. In general, the web is life line for expatriates. For my study of japanese, I use web sites in Japan but also abroad.

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.

It's already segmented

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. ;^)

The web never was American....

With a substantial number of Slashdot users (a third?) coming from non-American countries, you would notice quite a difference.

I search in German as well as English ... 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 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.