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Multiple Internets
It started out with Bush “mis-using” the English language once again, calling it the “Internets” instead of the internet in both the 2000 and 2004 election campaigns. Whether it was an accidental usage, or long-range introduction of trends into the language, the concept of multiple internets is fast gaining ground.
The principal of maintaining the Internet as a single, interconnected network with no preference for one type of bits over another–what geeks call “network neutrality”–is under assault. Foreign countries have led the charge. Saudi Arabia blocks content that runs counter to the clerics’ interpretation of Islam. China bars its citizens’ access to sites created by, among others, practitioners of Falun Gong. What results is the fragmentation of the Internet. The network that we’ve grown accustomed to over the past decade is, in a very real sense, becoming multiple Internets, because the Internet you encounter from within China is different from the Internet you encounter in the United States.
Western companies have helped accelerate this process by manufacturing the routers and software designed to let foreign governments filter the Internet. Prominent Internet companies based in the U.S. have also signaled that they are willing to work in a world where there are Internets rather than a single Internet.
And, from the same article:
It will no longer be possible for a start-up to put a site on the Internet and assume that it’s equally accessible to everyone in the world. And existing companies may suddenly discover that they are reaching much smaller audiences than they’ve grown used to. The fragmentation of the Internet is the fragmentation of markets.
Another article:
Basically, I’m starting to wonder if the one-Internet-for-all paradigm we’ve enjoyed so far is about to break and if we can expect a future where we all use smaller, private, for-profit or nonprofit, corporate, and/or political Internets according to our various locations and interests. Let me put it this way: it’s all too likely that George W. Bush didn’t misspeak when he mentioned “the Internets.” The military has probably already built an alternate Internet–if not more than one, and it’s looking all too possible that the Net itself is about to fracture into a mess of cliques, privately owned networks, and glorified Usenets.
So which internet of the future will you exist within? Which one do you exist in right now? How many internets are there currently? How do you get from one to the next? How can you verify that the TimBoucher.com of your internet (realm) is the same as the TimBoucher.com of my internet?
- Communications Between Internets
- EverQuest Zones
- Disinterested Dissident Internets
- Google’s Call for Global Privacy Standards
- Internet Balkanization
- Prev: eBay As Information Source
- Next: EverQuest Zones
November 10th, 2007 at 4:12 pm
[…] Really interesting as a corollary to the multiple internets discussion, as well as our on-going conversation about “web realms” (which I’ll be writing more about): EverQuest, a massively multiplayer online role-playing game, is set in the fantasy world of Norrath which is divided into more than 400 zones. Zones are playable areas of the EverQuest universe that can be accessed by players. They are connected to other zones by “zone lines”; crossing over to another zone is called “zoning”. Zoning can take anywhere from several seconds to several minutes, depending on the player’s computer. Zones are, in essence, the smallest unit of seamless playable area in the game, and are stored on the player’s hard drive. An area such as a city might be comprised of two or three smaller zones (a la Freeport), while a large zone might contain an entire small city and a vast forest (a la Greater Faydark). Zones represent a wide variety of geographical features that can be found in EverQuest, including plains, oceans, cities, deserts, and alternate planes of existence. […]
November 10th, 2007 at 4:47 pm
[…] Let’s say the internet does fragment into many overlapping internets… In fact, this isn’t a hypothetical argument; elements of it already exist. Just try searching for the same things on Google in various countries, or for more blatant examples, try running parallel searches on Baidu and Google. And that’s just Google. […]
November 12th, 2007 at 9:55 am
if you go to google video here in canada it gives you the google.ca version.
i don`t think ours is edited to fit in with ottawa`s world view otherwise i wouldn`t be able to see who won soccer matches, but it is a little irritiating to know that there is a bias, or that i can`t choose the .com version if i bloody well want.
March 29th, 2008 at 8:10 pm
[…] Either way, I’m proud to be a part of it. Making all of my content freely available in the Public Domain means, technically, that any end or intermediate user can make any use of it which they want. A human can use it, a spammer-human, a spammer-human’s semi-intelligent algorithms - whatever! The sky’s the limit. The more the merrier, I figure. And it’s absolutely nutty to be able to watch firsthand the behavior of information once you have set it free in the wild and it learns to survive on its own. Godspeed you little word-soldiers! May you worm your way across many internets and write yourselves into the viral codes people download on purpose to fix themselves in the distant future! Articles With Similar Themes: […]