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Comment by askosh | Hacker News Reader

There are more countries besides United States. I don't know why people here always refer to it as if it were the only ruler of the internet. It's not. In fact it does a piss poor job at playing its part.

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Please don't take HN threads into nationalistic flamewar. It's tedious and leads to worse.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20542805 and marked it off-topic.

I think the US is relevant here because it's where most of the big ad serving companies are based.

It also represents about 50% of the global advertising market (ad spending), so if the market changes there, it effects the rest of the world (for good and bad).

If another sets the standard for the internet it's google.

What ever they do, running the most viewed sites is quickly taken up by everyone else

You mean, aside from the fact that we invented the internet?

You are welcome.

The net add people know it was invented by a brit at a major European project. You're welcome.

That's the web, not the internet. The internet existed continuously for over 2 decades before the web was created (although the general public didn't know about it).

"Existed": had actual users. (The US government started funding continuous research into packet switching in 1960.)

Also, if Tim Berners-Lee (TBL) hadn't created the web, someone else would probably have used the internet to create something like it in a few years whereas if the US hadn't invested heavily in packet-switching in the 1960s, 70s and 80s, a much longer interval of time probably would've gone by before someone created anything capable of enabling an ordinary programmer or sysadmin like TBL was to create something like the web.

"Ordinary": not able to command a lot of capital or labor.

TBL persuaded his boss to let him create the web during working hours. His boss agreed largely because he thought that the project would be a good way for them to evaluate a new computer the boss had bought (by NeXT). In other words, the existence of the internet (which in turn enabled the existence of a community of programmers interested in donating code to innovative projects, a community that got a very big boost when Stallman started publishing on the internet in 1983) enabled the creation of the web without any serious commitment from government, corporate executives and people with lots of money.

In contrast, the creation of a network that allowed an ordinary programmer to recruit open-source contributions to his project and to easily deploy server and client software of his own design required massive outlays of capital over 3 decades. It easy for such massive outlays to go awry in various ways. The US government avoided its going awry. In contrast, the French government retained so much centralized control over Minitel that at no point in Minitel's history could an ordinary programmer have used Minitel to create something as innovative as the web.

(It wasn't until the internet had been almost completely turned over to the private sector in the early 1990s, for example, that any software started to track users more than absolutely necessary for the operation of the network: in the early 1990s, anyone could send and email with president@whitehouse.gov in the "From" field. The reason it worked that way was to maximize anonymity of senders. There was no way for the sender of an email in the early 1990s to know whether the recipient read it, the reason again being a desire among the designers and maintainers of the infrastructure to maximize privacy.)

What do you mean "we"? I'm American and can't take credit for what a few people invented decades ago.

What was your contribution to it, exactly?

Unless you did really create the internet, in which case thank you.

Nationalistic flamewar will get you banned here. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and use the site as intended, we'd be grateful.

Of the major browsers which are non-US based? Hint: not the majority. The point the op was making had nothing to do with your response claiming the US is the "only ruler of the internet".

Does the US do a poor job of regulation of monopolies in tech? You don't have to look hard to find supporters of that statement. But we're at a point in time where things are finally starting to bubble up and garner traction. Will it be perfect in the short term? Definitely not. But I'm hopeful the US can and will bring their portion of the blame back into check which is advantageous to a sum that's greater than simply the US.