'NET NATIONS

Back when television reached Australia in 1956, a time immortalised 
in old electronics magazines that I read, there were complaints 
that all the imported American content on TV would drown out 
Australian culture, particularly for the youth. As had happened 
earlier again in the film industry, the solution was quotas, for 
certain durations of locally produced content that needed to be 
broadcast by TV channels. Unlike the film quotas, the TV quotas for 
Australian content have remained right up to today, with commercial 
stations required to air 55% Australian-made content.

What's harder to determine is whether, over the course of time, 
this really worked. The children of the late 1950s are the retirees 
of today, the generations preceeding them are no longer much of a 
cultural influence. Have those cultural features some argued to 
preserve faded with them? Were they preserved simply through 
industry regulation, or were they a figment of xenophobic minds to 
begin with?

In the 1950s important films had to be flown from overseas by air 
to make it to screens in Australia. Less immediate content would be 
sent by sea, along with all the narion's other imported wares, 
which had the effect of keeping the country in a then-famous time 
warp compared to culture on the other side of the world. It also 
inspired more local innovation to create Australian versions of 
ideas heard about, but not arrived from, overseas. Again the 
government reinforced this, by heavily taxing imported goods.

As the practical walls blocking cultural and economic exchange with 
Australia's parent western powers came down, these legal barriers 
attempted to still preserve a degree of artificial isolation from 
those distant continents. Economically the practice of 
globalisation has been etrememly successful at pulling down these 
walls, throughout the later decades of the 20th century. The world 
economy is now so linked that the resulting tangle of culture, 
politics, and business is practically a system of controlled chaos. 
But it means we can get lots of cheap junk from China. On the other 
hand finding a new item made in Australia has become a novelty, and 
the profit from much of this trade by the wealthiest businesses 
disappears off to foreign bank accounts, often routed behind the 
back of the tax man.

Besides opening Australia up to the world economy though, how about 
the world society? While TV, film, and other media began that, it's 
only with the spread of the internet that individuals have been 
granted access to individual foreign people in the way that we've 
long been able to buy their foreign goods. What transformation will 
this result in for Australian, and indeed world, society? Will 
cultural characteristcs condense into one homogenous form of 
borderless internet-based culture? People of the one 'net nation?

Mirroring the 1950s and before, the Australian government has now, 
somewhat late, introduced quotas on local content investment from 
streaming services beginning mid this year:
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-01-29/streaming-giants-to-be-required-to-make-australian-films-and-tv-/101904938

On another level of course are countries such as China, blocking 
large numbers of popular foreign websites that offend them one way 
or another. Projects to construct internet links into China for 
faster routing to the USA and other western countries are also 
hampered by politics, so there's a physical difficulty with the 
bandwidth available even for permitted international internet 
communications. In this way the Chinese internet exists within it's 
own 'net nation, maybe now set to be shared with Russia. Plans for 
China to contruct a free worldwide LEO satellite internet network 
further emphasise how these 'net nations need not be constrained by 
the borders of individual countries, they are a way to spread a 
common cultural environment across the globe.

The USA got there first, so the 'net in general, even down the 
universal '.com' TLD, tends to be American, and furthermore 
English-language. For a cultural transformation on the scale of the 
internet though, these are still very early days. How many separate 
'net nations might spring up in this way, and what global power 
could they grant the geographical nations that control them? Could 
people's sense of 'net nationality become stronger than that of 
their physical nationality? The internet is still growing up, but 
growing up into what?

 - The Free Thinker