[shortnamed]

love the blatant americentrism in the site:

"This is a battle for the Internet's future." - just American internet's future

"Team Cable want to control & tax the Internet" - they will be able to control the global system in which the US is just a part of?

"If we lose net neutrality, the Internet will never be the same" - American internet, others will be fine

[dang]

Please don't take threads off topic into nationalistic resentment. It inevitably starts pointless spats that would be ridiculous if they weren't so nasty.

It's a U.S. site; of course they don't put the qualifier "American" on everything, for the same reason programming languages have namespaces. HN's case is different, since we're obviously an international community, but (a) readers here are smart enough to disambiguate things, and (b) the internationalness of the site means we all need to be particularly respectful when talking about each other's countries.

[bicubic]

> - just American internet's future

American internet has a very strong and direct impact on 'international' internet. Aside from the fact that a large fraction of international traffic passes through American switches or servers, America is a policy leader to many other nations - both passively and actively. Passively by signalling to telcos in other nations that they could probably attempt the same thing, and actively by forcing some of these provisions as part and parcel of trade agreements.

You just can't pretend that the impact these decisions will be isolated to the US.

[Sujan]

It still should be written differently then. As a non-American this all reads quite... strange.

[FussyZeus]

Well the website is written by and for Americans, because it's an American law, being worked through the American system, to target American companies.

Don't get me wrong, we need everybody's help we can get for this, but if they were trying to do the same in Germany it would be written by Germans, in German, and be targeting a German audience.

[rev_null]

Much like healthcare, it's safe to assume that discussions about net neutrality are specific to the USA as most first-world nations established this a while ago.

[dsr_]

Make suggestions, send them in. [e-mail]

[StevePerkins]

Oh good grief.

THOUGHT EXPERIMENT: Imagine an ISP writing some text about "the American Internet". Imagine that it gives the impression of the American Internet being isolated. That foreign entities shouldn't worry (or lobby), because changes to American law or regulation will have no impact on the rest of the world.

In this scenario, I imagine there would be lots of comments about American arrogance. About how the Internet is more interconnected than that. About how ignorant Americans are, for not realizing that other nations' data flows through our pipes, and is subject to the whims of our legislators and regulators, etc.

People on HN are always so bothered by everything. Too often on posts, you have to scroll halfway down the page to find any substantive, non-meta discussion... rather than arguments about font selection or CSS layout, or various political tangents that people find more interesting. At any rate, the U.S. is deserving of so many legitimate criticisms, the imagined grievance in this sub-thread is flatly absurd.

[noxToken]

That's not just HN. That's anywhere anything about America is discussed. No matter what side of an argument it is, there is always plenty of criticism of American sensibilities regardless of actual relevance. We get it: we're all pompous, obese, gun nuts who have no consideration for any other nation than 'murica. Now that we've gotten that out of the way, can we focus on the topic at hand?

[aladin]

it does

[shortnamed]

London has been the biggest European city for banks, but with Brexit looming on the horizon many of the banks are relocating to mainland EU and they seem to be doing just fine.

The companies, the entrepreneurs that would be affected could move their operations just the same way.

[zdkl]

Yeah sure, let's move all local industry and commerce out of England, it can't be that hard if the multinational banks with their armies of lawyers and accountants can do it, right?

[AndyMcConachie]

Yes you can. The United States isn't a thought leader anymore in this kind of thing. If anything many politicians in countries other than the USA get more popular by proposing to do the opposite of what the USA is doing. Think Paris Climate Accord if you need an example.

[Majestic121]

I get what you mean about americentrism, but to be honest a loss of Net Neutrality in America would be a very symbolic defeat for the rest of the world and might lead to other regions following the fall.

[Luc]

Or it might lead to other regions viewing it as a cautionary tale, once they see the actual real-world effects.

[sbarre]

That's not typically how things end up going

[Luc]

This was on my mind (and likewise for Le Pen):

"Wilders' public admiration for Trump was ultimately his downfall because the American's radical, chaotic policies go too far even for his own most loyal followers -- not to mention the many swing voters who had sympathized with him."

http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/why-mark-rutte-wo...

[omginternets]

It's an American law targeting American ISPs...

>American internet, others will be fine

Yeah, because what happens in America doesn't affect anyone else...

[thg]

> Yeah, because what happens in America doesn't affect anyone else...

You can say the same about almost every other nation on this planet. Where are the outrages against Russia, China, Saudi Arabia, France, Great Britain, ...?

[omginternets]

I see them posted here all the time.

[panic]

I think it's natural for a site about American politics to be America-centric. Adding "American" everywhere would make the site read better to people outside the country, but it would weaken its message to the people it's trying to reach -- we love to believe that the entire internet revolves around America, as you can see in the other replies to your comment.

[Ambrosia]

Agree, I'm not sure that there would be this big an outcry when the government actually tries to ban encryption here in the UK.

[kaolti]

Perfectly factual comment, don't see how it adds any value to the conversation though.

[zeep]

Would you prefer them saying something like "This is a battle for our Internet's future."? I think either way would be fine because it was written for Americans anyways.

[chrshawkes]

The majority of these websites are American websites created by American companies with a primary user base of American citizens.

[PrefixKitten]

Do you intend not to use US websites anymore?

[shortnamed]

Most of the US websites that I visit are owned by major multinational corporations, which do more business in the rest of the world than they do in the US (http://www.businessinsider.com/apple-iphone-sales-region-chi...), (https://www.recode.net/2017/4/29/15479932/alphabet-revenue-g...), (https://about.twitter.com/company)

Are they even US companies anymore?

[eeZah7Ux]

You, and others, are missing the point: the americentrism is in assuming that the website readers are from US, not about the impact on US trends on the rest of the world.

[r3bl]

Well, I'm outside of the US, and needed to turn on a VPN to just be able to see the impact of the Battle for the Net action. Most of the websites had some sort of geographical restrictions on who to show the message to.

[sexydefinesher]

More like not use US ISP's...

[Magnets]

All large sites use cloud or CDN services so US ISPs throttling their customers makes no difference

[fredley]

The internet is still basically an American institution. If it's bad for the 'American Internet' it's bad for everyone. Also US policy on matters like these is usually propagated around the World. If it happens in America, it'll probably happen in [country] soon after.

[jstanley]

> The internet is still basically an American institution.

Can you elaborate on this?

[thanksgiving]

Look at your computer. How much of the software and services you use is based in the US? Don't rank by variety. Rank by minutes engaged each day.

For example, news.ycombinator.com is decidedly us based your electric company is not but you spend more time on hacker news than paying your electricity bill.

[jstanley]

The Hacker News server is based in the US, but I spend more time reading and responding to articles and comments than I do looking at the HN HTML.

The articles and commenters are from all around the world.

Part of the beauty of the internet is that it does not care about or even see geographical or political borders. Saying the internet is "basically an American institution" makes no sense.

[zdkl]

What you say is true but it's irrelevant if the physical hosting or routing touches US jurisdiction.

[dis-sys]

You do realize that there are 730 million active Chinese Internet users who basically don't use any US services? They spent more time on Internet/mobile than US users[1], they paid trillion of _real $_ last year using Chinese online payment systems[2]. If you like, we can also compare how many hours they spent on WeChat social media, or watching TV series/videos online.

[1] http://www.vertoanalytics.com/why-china-beats-the-u-s-in-mob... [2] http://technode.com/2017/04/07/alipay-leads-chinas-third-par...