7 ms·

The Web is Like Canada

43 points by davesailer 16y ago

rationalbeaver 16y ago
Enormous but mostly empty?
- Herring 16y ago
  Full of porn?
dasil003 16y ago
The days of the web being defined by what it is not are numbered. It's still new enough that the culture as a whole hasn't yet internalized and defined it, but certainly young people don't need to make comparisons to any other form of media. The web has a richness and ubiquity that makes it hard to pin down to a single definition.
chaosmachine 16y ago
Title needs a "(2000)", this was written ten years ago.
- julius_geezer 16y ago
  Indeed. I found myself doing the math to figure out how Trudeau could have been prime minister for almost half the author's life.
- potatolicious 16y ago
  Not sure why you were downvoted - the age of this is relevant. Example: > "Convergence is happening faster, and with more dramatic implications for the net, in Canada than anywhere else on earth. We outpace even the United States in this regard, with its richly-financed WebTV and AOLTV experiments." And yet the situation has reversed. Streaming media in Canada is almost non-existent - it took years for iTunes to show up in the great white north, Pandora, Last.fm do not exist there, nor does Hulu or Netflix (though the latter is about to change). As a Canadian living in the US, the pervasiveness of the internet in our media consumption here is earth-shatteringly far ahead of what we have in Canada. Canada, at the time of this piece's writing, may have been ahead in its experimentations into the internet. At this point in time though, it is a virtual internet backwater. I lay the blame squarely on archaic protectionist media laws, as well as a thoroughly uncontrolled telecom monopoly worse than the most terrible of American telcos. Canadians now live in an information backwater - where many innovative forms of media distribution and production are simply not allowed to exist, due to laws originally designed to prevent over-Americanization of our media. Other forms of media are allowed to exist, but cannot because most Canadians, despite having broadband, have onerous bandwidth caps (that are being lowered over time!) that prevents the streaming and constantly-connected lifestyle from proliferating. The traffic-shaping that the ISPs practice (and that the CRTC regulators conveniently overlook), along with the telcos stranglehold over the government (almost all attempts at allowing third party ISPs to compete have failed) do not help matters either. The situation of the internet in Canada is truly dire.
  - mitjak 16y ago
    I'm going to print your comment out and sign it in blood. I'm still shocked I have a 6GB iPhone data plan that includes tethering. That's a much better deal than the 20GB cable Internet capped at under 5mbit, p2p traffic shaped, with inconsistent speeds and service, for more than I'm paying for the tethering plan. And don't grt me started on Amazon MP3, Hulu, NBC, Hulu and others being unavailable. It's like they want me to torrent every single thing over 3G.
- bosch 16y ago
  I'm wondering if we used to read the whole articles back in the day? He started wandering around 3/4's of the way through and I was thinking wow this is pretty long compared to most blogs/articles - then I saw it was from 2000.
  - Ardit20 16y ago
    Articles on alistapart are often that long and if it is of use you would probably read it. I didn't really find much use in this article so I thought I better use my time better.
mast 16y ago
Funny that the author's name was also Joe Clark. Joe Clark defeated Trudeau to become Prime Minister in 1979, and then lost to Trudeau in 1980.
- imack 16y ago
  I read the first couple of paragraphs thinking that this was an op-ed by the former Prime Minister. It wasn't until I came across the word "apeshit" that I began to wonder.
  - chrismendis 16y ago
    This is precisely the historical impact that I would expect Joe Clark to have, with this sort of sentimental essay. If you have nothing useful to say, then your ego doesn't justify the fact that you are saying anything.
- dgrant 16y ago
  Yeah, he should use his middle initial or something. When I did my Masters I did everything using my middle initial (even though I never did before) just because there was another guy at the university with the exact same name. It makes sense, no one asked me to, I just did it.
rubinelli 16y ago
I hope you don't mind some XKCD, but the difference that immediately comes to my mind between Canada and the web is this: http://xkcd.com/180/ http://xkcd.com/180/
tomlin 16y ago
As a Canadian, I wish I could say we're as far ahead as this dated article allures to. As it stands today, we have telecommunication (mobile, land, data) rates and deployment equivalent to third-world countries.

43 points by davesailer 16y ago

rationalbeaver 16y ago

Enormous but mostly empty?

Herring 16y ago
Full of porn?

dasil003 16y ago

The days of the web being defined by what it is not are numbered. It's still new enough that the culture as a whole hasn't yet internalized and defined it, but certainly young people don't need to make comparisons to any other form of media. The web has a richness and ubiquity that makes it hard to pin down to a single definition.

chaosmachine 16y ago

Title needs a "(2000)", this was written ten years ago.

julius_geezer 16y ago
Indeed. I found myself doing the math to figure out how Trudeau could have been prime minister for almost half the author's life.
potatolicious 16y ago
Not sure why you were downvoted - the age of this is relevant. Example: > "Convergence is happening faster, and with more dramatic implications for the net, in Canada than anywhere else on earth. We outpace even the United States in this regard, with its richly-financed WebTV and AOLTV experiments." And yet the situation has reversed. Streaming media in Canada is almost non-existent - it took years for iTunes to show up in the great white north, Pandora, Last.fm do not exist there, nor does Hulu or Netflix (though the latter is about to change). As a Canadian living in the US, the pervasiveness of the internet in our media consumption here is earth-shatteringly far ahead of what we have in Canada. Canada, at the time of this piece's writing, may have been ahead in its experimentations into the internet. At this point in time though, it is a virtual internet backwater. I lay the blame squarely on archaic protectionist media laws, as well as a thoroughly uncontrolled telecom monopoly worse than the most terrible of American telcos. Canadians now live in an information backwater - where many innovative forms of media distribution and production are simply not allowed to exist, due to laws originally designed to prevent over-Americanization of our media. Other forms of media are allowed to exist, but cannot because most Canadians, despite having broadband, have onerous bandwidth caps (that are being lowered over time!) that prevents the streaming and constantly-connected lifestyle from proliferating. The traffic-shaping that the ISPs practice (and that the CRTC regulators conveniently overlook), along with the telcos stranglehold over the government (almost all attempts at allowing third party ISPs to compete have failed) do not help matters either. The situation of the internet in Canada is truly dire.
- mitjak 16y ago
  I'm going to print your comment out and sign it in blood. I'm still shocked I have a 6GB iPhone data plan that includes tethering. That's a much better deal than the 20GB cable Internet capped at under 5mbit, p2p traffic shaped, with inconsistent speeds and service, for more than I'm paying for the tethering plan. And don't grt me started on Amazon MP3, Hulu, NBC, Hulu and others being unavailable. It's like they want me to torrent every single thing over 3G.
bosch 16y ago
I'm wondering if we used to read the whole articles back in the day? He started wandering around 3/4's of the way through and I was thinking wow this is pretty long compared to most blogs/articles - then I saw it was from 2000.
- Ardit20 16y ago
  Articles on alistapart are often that long and if it is of use you would probably read it. I didn't really find much use in this article so I thought I better use my time better.

mast 16y ago

Funny that the author's name was also Joe Clark. Joe Clark defeated Trudeau to become Prime Minister in 1979, and then lost to Trudeau in 1980.

imack 16y ago
I read the first couple of paragraphs thinking that this was an op-ed by the former Prime Minister. It wasn't until I came across the word "apeshit" that I began to wonder.
- chrismendis 16y ago
  This is precisely the historical impact that I would expect Joe Clark to have, with this sort of sentimental essay. If you have nothing useful to say, then your ego doesn't justify the fact that you are saying anything.
dgrant 16y ago
Yeah, he should use his middle initial or something. When I did my Masters I did everything using my middle initial (even though I never did before) just because there was another guy at the university with the exact same name. It makes sense, no one asked me to, I just did it.

rubinelli 16y ago

I hope you don't mind some XKCD, but the difference that immediately comes to my mind between Canada and the web is this: http://xkcd.com/180/ http://xkcd.com/180/

tomlin 16y ago

As a Canadian, I wish I could say we're as far ahead as this dated article allures to. As it stands today, we have telecommunication (mobile, land, data) rates and deployment equivalent to third-world countries.