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By DAVID BRAKE
Illustration by Pamela Hobbs
On the Internet, it's almost as easy to reach, say, Estonia as it is to e-mail your boss. In fact, physical locations become largely invisible and nearly irrelevant. The only way to judge what country a Web page is coming from (if it doesn't tell you) is to see if its address ends with a country code -- if it ends in .com or .org, it could be located anywhere.
When the Web's explosive growth first began, I therefore hoped it might develop a truly international flavor: The world could discover what the U.S. was thinking, and Americans might learn to look beyond their borders. It hasn't turned out that way.
The Internet, it seems, cannot overcome decades of American parochialism overnight. More than half of all Web sites are run from the U.S.. And discouragingly many of them either don't know that the rest of the world could be reading their pages, or don't seem to give a damn.
Of course, plenty of pages are unlikely to be relevant to a non-American; there's no need to keep the rest of the world in mind when putting Iowa Farmer Today online. But there are far too many sites that needlessly make non-Americans feel like second-class citizens when we visit.
Next: It's a small world, after all
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