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Comment by CmonDev | Hacker News Reader

Nationwide? In the nation of let's say Russia? Or the default nation?

I think it's acceptable for a US news source talking about a US company to imply that "nationwide" means the USA.

Do you think The Verge consider their market to be only the USA? They are using the www not the usw so far as I can tell.

Truth is they make it quite clear which nation in the first line of the article - I think The Verge are a global news source [albeit, yes, with a USA focus] and that they're quite cognisant of that, given the rest of this article.

'www' is not their tld, .com is, and .com is a US tld, created by the US government and administered by US corporations. Russia has .ru, and if there was an article on theverge.ru talking about a nation-wide rollout, we could assume they were talking about the nation of Russia.

>.com is a US tld //

.us is the ccTLD for USA. .com is the defacto default for all types of entities from across the world. Verisign call .com "The Global Online Standard". Yes, USA broke the convention and structure to preference themselves - that seems to be a favorite passtime.

This is very naive, by far the largest audience of The Verge is the USA and the audience outside of the USA knows full well that they are American, so when they write "nationwide" they mean the USA. To think otherwise would be foolish.

Well I've visited the Verge 3 other times in the last 2 years [on this machine] but it just appeared to me to be a standard web based news source rather than specifically USA focused. Are all The Verge's journalists from USA, do they not cover stories that aren't parochial? I'm curious you characterise me as naive in this - The Verge don't appear to promote a USA-centric view.

As I said, the story made it clear it was USA in the first line of the article proper - I'd think that was part of The Verge being cognisant of the web being global and knowing that they get non-USA readers.

Personally I consider it foolish to assume web visitors are from a specific geography and that - in particular - a .com website is only to be read from, or at least in the context of, USA. There is no default country on the web IMO.

However, it would be an improvement if the hn title could address an international audience.

HN titles aren't allowed to deviate, even if the title lacks context, poorly done, or misleading. Also HN is primarily a US thing based on user base.

HN titles can deviate, but you should be careful with the deviations. In this case something like Nationwide (USA) probably would've been fine. Make a post after the submission so that dang and other mods/admins can see your rationale for your change if you're particularly concerned. Worst case, they change it back on you.

> talking about a US company

Starbucks is in Russia too.

Starbucks is in lots of places, but it's still a US company. Same way Sony is in lots of places, but is still a Japanese company.

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