[8809] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
One nation, like a quilt...
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (The future Ross Stapleton-Gray)
Sun Dec 5 18:42:01 1993
Date: Sun, 5 Dec 1993 16:41:30 -0700 (MST)
From: The future Ross Stapleton-Gray <STAPLETON@bpa.arizona.edu>
To: com-priv@psi.com
Dave Hughes suggests that the trend has been toward an *increase* in
nationality; while I'm observing an erosion of it... I think it's just
how you look at the problem. Tom some extent, what's happening with
the world's nations is what happened with computer networking, to wit:
Two decades ago there were numerous large corporations, all with
centralized ADP shops; users were managed by "the Center." PCs and
networking came in..."the Provinces" started feeling their oats.
But inter-corporate networks were nonstandard (hence numerous yet
less effective); corporations felt internal pressures (departments
wanting more autonomy), but were not threatened at their cores.
Now comes the Internet... not only does it facilitate small corporate
subcomponents to do whatever they wish without the necessity of
alliegence to "the Center," but it facilitates their inter-corporate
(or, perhaps, extra-corporate) collaboration.
For "Internet," read "modern communications media (TV, radio, telephone,
fax, computer networking, etc.)," and you have global politics in
the 1990s, with subnational, subcorporate, sub-anything interaction.
They might call themselves nations in and of themselves, but they're
hardly important in the same nationalistic sense that, say, France or
Germany have been. Does it matter if there are separate mini-nations
if they all take Visa, have at least one McDonalds, and offer TCP/IP?
(And the French don't have to like ASCII, they just have to recognize its
ISO-registered form, which is, of course, an *international* standard
for information interchange on the GII, with many others.)
Ross
