Comment

Comment on The US population only accounts for 4.2% of the world.

The internet originated in the US. All of the original specs were made by Americans. ASCII is literally built around English, and ASCII is at the foundation of every single core technology of the internet. Hell, even when they designed UTF-8, it was still Western-centric; to this day it gets some push back from the Orient, because it’s makes things harder for them - I think there was a fight to standardize on UTF-16 because it was easier for Asian languages; I may not be remembering the details correctly, but there’s some legitimate beef some Asian languages have with UTF-8.

Now, obviously, more non-Americans are on the internet than Americans, but it’s the same argument as Critical Race Theory: when the entire foundation and infrastructure is built on a bias, that bias influences all interactions even when isn’t overtly obvious, or even intentional.

source

Sort:hotnew top

efstajas@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Many networking foundations originated in the US, but what we’d think of as “the Internet” today was invented in Switzerland by a British man.

source
- sxan@midwest.social ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  
  which is what I’d wager many think of when you say “the Internet”
  
  I wager you’d be right, but most people are wrong.
  
  I’m saying that everything is built on foundations that are fundamentally English and American, and this influenced even Berners-Lees’s creation. HTTP and HTML were fundamentally ASCII. DNS and the WWW eventually evolved broader encoding support, but it’s clearly tacked-on and awkward. All you need to do is look at URL encoding rules as proof.
  
  I’m not saying it’s right; I’m just saying there consequences of an English, American-centric design of what underlies all computer technology today is evident at all higher levels, no matter how hard we try to mask them.
  
  source