Silicon Insider: Is the Net American?

B U R L I N G A M E, Calif., Aug. 15 -- Is the Internet American?

That seems a silly question. After all, this is the age ofglobalization. Technology is no longer supposed to be geographically determined. The experience of surfing the Net — as I did in the last monthfrom Germany, Namibia and England — is the same everywhere. How many timeswhen purchasing something on an e-auction site have you been amazed todiscover that the seller is in Australia or France?

And yet, even as we pat ourselves on the back for being so enlightenedand cosmopolitan, we might take a moment and ask if our perspective might bea little jingoistic after all.

I found myself pondering this while reading about the Yahoo! censorshipcase currently under way in Paris. In case you haven’t heard — and the buried coverage of the case says something equally striking about our attitude towards the rest of the world — two French anti-racism advocacy groups have sued Yahoo! over the appearance of Nazi paraphernalia on its auction site (illegal in France, but legal in the United States). The French court, the Tribunal de Grande Instance, hasdelayed its judgment, which could amount to a fine of $90,000 per day if Yahoo! doesn’t figure out how to block access by French citizens toparts of the site. The ruling will come after a three-month study by an expert panel.

What makes the case doubly interesting is that the auctions in questionreside not on some Yahoo! server in France, but here in Silicon Valley.Thus, if Yahoo! were to simply acquiesce, it could be seen as operatingagainst the First Amendment of the Constitution.

We Are the Net

And there’s the rub. I suspect most people reading the story simplyshrugged and muttered, “Well, after all, it’s the French.” True enough, butdon’t you think it’s also the Afghans and the Russians, the Japanese and theSouth Africans, the Bolivians and the Inuits? Just imagine what theInternet feels like to them. Probably like a first-time visitor toManhattan, a place of bright lights and amazing sites, as well as the mostdegraded experiences, where the rich race by in limousines andshopkeepers set up tiny storefronts, where crime and lust hold sway over dark alleys,and tabloid gossip shrieks from every street corner.