Americans rule the Internet?

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I live in England but why are so many things on the Internet 'american'?

They number about 300 million. Just the sheer numbers mean that by the law of averages there are going to be more of them creating, or posting on, English-language websites visited by other western hemisphere dwellers who also frequent English-language sites. I guess.

More of America has more Internet-Access than most of the rest of the World-Population.
Additionally, more of the English-Speaking Internet-Users are located in America, because it's like this joke...

Someone who can speak Three Languages is Called : Tri-Lingual
Someone who can speak Two Languages is Called : Bi-Lingual

Someone who can only speak One Language is Called : American

You will find that most of the content you find on-line is from Russian-Speaking countries if you use Yandex.
A lot of results will also come from Japan if you use SearchDesk for your Search-Engine

English-Language-Wise, when you use something like Google or Bing, and have your Regional-Settings set to a country called America, most of the content you will get will also be localised to America, but if your Regional-Settings were to change to somewhere like France, you can expect more results from France.

There may be a sheer number of Americans on line, but of the Nigerians on-line 99% are billionaire princes who just need a little help getting their money out of the country.

Al Gore invented the internet and he's American, so there ya ago.

The internet was invented by the US Military. The US military has an agency called Defense Advanced Projects Research Agency, DARPA. It does all sorts of very cool, very weird stuff, most of which is so highly classified that it's possible that even the POTUS doesn't know about it.

Anyway, after the Cuban Missile Crisis there was a lot of concern about communications after a nuclear war. The main method of long distance communication in the 60s was teletype (telephone service was so outrageously expensive that a lot of people had little hourglasses that were used to tell a person when their conversations were getting too costly and it was time to hang up) and somebody wondered if teletype signals could be routed via breaking up messages into "packets" that would each take a different route. So if a portion of the copper wire network had been vaporized, messages could simply be routed around it.

DARPA invented the necessary hardware, and by 1968 the new and improved telex network was online. It worked ok, but by the 1980s it had been superseded by satellites and improved radio communications. In the late 80s, the brass at DARPA regarded DARPAnet as a white elephant that drained way too much cash and only benefited a tiny group of geeks. After the fall of the USSR, the army moved to finally pull the plug on DARPAnet. So the geeks simply approached Congress to keep their baby operational, convincing a US Senator from Tennessee, Al Gore, to sponsor a bill to hand over DARPAnet to a new nonprofit foundation. The bill passed with virtually no fanfare.

By late 1993, the nonprofits were set up and operational, and the army was very happy to walk away from their albatross. It was renamed "Internet", and the first "Internet Service Providers" started to pop up, many of them were guys who had run electronic bulletin boards for ages. All they had to do was buy a specialized PC called a "server" from a company like Sun Microsystems or Silicon Graphics, hook it to a bank of modems, and advertise.

The US invented the internet but Britain invented the web

America, India and China are the largest cluster of servers that make up the internet. Simpling Googling reveals that fact. I am surprised Russia is not higher and surprised at how low Iran is. I suppose its hard to keep servers going in the midst of all them burning our flag in the streets.

Because England is roughly the size of one American state in terms of population and geographic size, and America has fifty states. We are fifty times larger than you.
(took my Irish husband a while to get his head around this)

America largely created the internet as mentioned and most people speaking English online are American just by the numbers. 330 million Americans, the Commonwealth countries that speak English have maybe a half of that? English is also the language of international commerce, it is the default fallback language in most of the world. Lucky us.

You need some schooling because you're WAY off base.

It is true that the UK is only about the same physical size as 1.5 average US states (if you leave out the one state of Alaska in your math).

But the UK has the population size of about eleven average sized US states. And the GNP and Military power etc of that order of magnitude to go with that. Its population size that counts. We couldnt have won WWII if our main ally, the Brits, were only as tiny as you think they are.


Britain is the opposite of Canada. On the map Canada is as big as the whole USA (slightly larger actually), but Canada only has little more than one tenth of our population size. The UK is only as big as Oregon but as 65 million people (more than one fifth of our 300 plus million).

The ratios of population size change over the years, but the rule of thumb I like to use to conceptualize the relative population sizes of countries is this: California equals all of Canada, two Canadas (or two Californias) equal one UK (or one France), and two UKs equal one Japan, and two Japans equal one USA.

Last edited by naturalplastic on 03 Jul 2016, 8:33 am, edited 1 time in total.

The US jostles other giant countries like India, and China, to dominate the net because of GNP size, and population size.

And if you live in an English speaking country you would tend to get directed to servers serving the English speaking world (maybe two thirds of the population of which is the one country of the USA). So to English speaking Netcitizens the USA's already large size gets further exaggerated in appearance.

About half of the IP addresses that resolve to a website or other user friendly destination (ie via DNS) are registered in America. Japan, the UK and China are a distant second.