It costs Facebook, YouTube, MySpace and others the same - or even more, because of slow bandwidth in certain countries - to deliver content in different parts of the world. The earnings, however, are very different; compared to the US, in India, Brazil, Poland or China these sites are earning next to nothing.
The consequences of this may be far-reaching and very serious. Sites like Hulu are already blocking content to most countries of the world because of copyright reasons. Video sharing site Veoh had recently blocked its service from users in Africa, Asia, Latin America and Eastern Europe. Being in Croatia, I tried to watch a video there, and received the following message:
"Veoh is no longer available in CROATIA. If you are not in CROATIA or think you have received this message in error, please go to veoh.com and report the issue."
From my point of view, this seems cruel. However, if Veoh simply cannot sustain delivering video to certain areas of the world; if the choice is between shutting the service down altogether or shutting it down in these areas only, I can understand their decision. Can we blame them?
MySpace is trying a different approach. They're testing a stripped-down version of the site, called Profile Lite, which they plan to deliver as a feature to countries with low broadband penetration. Seems like a good idea; but hopefully the users from these countries will get a choice between the standard and the lite versions of the site.
If they don't, and if other sites such as YouTube and Facebook start to drastically alter their presentation and content for visitors from certain countries, we'll soon have not one, but several very different Internets.
Let's put aside the problems it will cause to people like me; writing about the Internet, I'll always have to doublecheck whether whatever I'm seeing is the same as whatever everyone else is seeing. But having several "versions" of the Internet will severely change what the Internet is all about. Communication between users in different parts of the world will be complicated and altered, since they won't share the same experience. MySpace might not be "a place for friends" anymore; it might become "a place for friends living in the same country."
This fragmentation of the Internet may be inevitable. After all, is it even possible to have everyone connecting to a huge global network and sharing the exact same experience? If you take into consideration the varying degrees of broadband penetration around the world, broadband throttling done by ISPs, localized versions of various services, and now this latest trend of saving costs by cutting off access to certain countries, the answer is no, not really.
However, I think that it's the job of CEOs, regulators and overseers to try and fight this fragmentation. In fact, I hope that companies that are giving into it now will ultimately be forced to face the problem and adapt - or perish. I hope that new business models will arise which will close the gap between profits made by online companies in the US and other countries of the world.
Otherwise, the Internet 10 years from now may turn out to be a worse place than it is today.