Paul Ballard's Weblog

One of the most frustrating parts of being from the US and living in India is that Internet sites you’ve trusted for years will use your IP address to look up your physical location and then do any number of things to show that they don’t trust you.  These often mindless restrictions range from the mildly annoying, like MSDN asking me to sign into the site in Hindi, to the severely frustrating tendency to limit access to media and other site content all-together (Yes Hulu, I’m talking about you, bastards!  I’m an American citizen and I have a God-given, constitutionally guaranteed right to watch Family Guy).

While this might seem like a small nuisance to most readers (assuming I ever get any), this is actually just more evidence of the fact that the Internet is NOT just one huge global network of anonymous freedom.  As Google’s recent fight with China showed, it’s actually a conglomeration of loosely joined networks each with its own rules and limitations dictated by governments, corporations, and other high minded bodies.

I believe in the future we’re going to start seeing these walls become more visible, with clearly defined boundaries for data storage, media access, and even email.  This will have a huge effect on things like offshore development, news reporting (blogs or otherwise), SaaS applications, etc. etc.  And for those of you that think these boundaries are restricted to foreign countries with oppressive government policies, think again.  If you’re reading this blog post from darkest Africa, deeply red China, or the sunny shores of Florida you can count on the fact that some government body somewhere can shut off access to it at any instant.

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