Actually in Europe for example, most prepaid sim cards also offer setting details through a web portal, and it just automatically takes money off your card on a set date in a month to recharge the SIM.
I'm an Estonian, also a nordic country. We have a bunch of things we are years ahead of in terms of digital innovations (https://e-estonia.com/), all while having a 1.3m population. What does the USA do better exactly?
Estonia is certainly performing well. But since it's so tiny it's really hard to compare against a giant like USA. Although much of the same problem applies to Nordics.
We use Google, Facebook, Youtube, Snapchat, Whatsapp, Apple - all American products. Whereas the Nordic countries produce very few major digital innovations used globally.
Well, true, all the big players are from USA. But as far digital innovation inside of a nation go, and for the nation, USA needs to do a lot of catching up. Because while true that USA made a thing called "instagram influencers", it has done very little for its people.
If by Nordic you mean Northern European, then Estonia is Nordic, all tho' often misrepresented as Eastern European.
> We use Google, Facebook, Youtube, Snapchat, Whatsapp, Apple - all American products.
You say we use them now. But some of these companies are barely past their teenage years. Nokia as a company is around 150 years old, they didnt win fast and they are still in business (but not in the phone business)
How long any of these current, not winners but ”winning it right now” last? Who knows.
They are still young, but they will all fail or ceases to exist eventually and hopefully dont leave cities bankrupt behind them.
Also, we all had instant messages, social networks (very small, geographically) etc. before these behemoths and now days globalism is getting some pushback around the globe, who knows how long and what markets they can later dominate.
But on the other hand, any meaningful comparisons get harder and less relevant for us if we use a time span of the past 150 years. I don't know if it really even matters that much that most companies die eventually. They're still producing lots of value right now. While Nokia is certainly not doing particularly well nowadays despite having a long and partially very successful history.
But even Linux was ultimately developed in USA. So was/is Unity. I don't know if Linux would've ever been the success it is had Linus Torvalds stayed in Finland developing it.
I'd hope we would have a big list of recent examples of major innovations from the Nordics but unfortunately nearly all the major digital products or innovations seem to be decades old. I can't think of almost any globally really promising Finnish digital startup right now.
Well, it seems crass to point this out, but NATO has a big presence in the Baltic states right now because you guys won’t invest in your own defence. So yeah, that is what they do.
There are more countries besides United States. I don't know why people here always refer to it as if it were the only ruler of the internet. It's not. In fact it does a piss poor job at playing its part.
It also represents about 50% of the global advertising market (ad spending), so if the market changes there, it effects the rest of the world (for good and bad).
That's the web, not the internet. The internet existed continuously for over 2 decades before the web was created (although the general public didn't know about it).
"Existed": had actual users. (The US government started funding continuous research into packet switching in 1960.)
Also, if Tim Berners-Lee (TBL) hadn't created the web, someone else would probably have used the internet to create something like it in a few years whereas if the US hadn't invested heavily in packet-switching in the 1960s, 70s and 80s, a much longer interval of time probably would've gone by before someone created anything capable of enabling an ordinary programmer or sysadmin like TBL was to create something like the web.
"Ordinary": not able to command a lot of capital or labor.
TBL persuaded his boss to let him create the web during working hours. His boss agreed largely because he thought that the project would be a good way for them to evaluate a new computer the boss had bought (by NeXT). In other words, the existence of the internet (which in turn enabled the existence of a community of programmers interested in donating code to innovative projects, a community that got a very big boost when Stallman started publishing on the internet in 1983) enabled the creation of the web without any serious commitment from government, corporate executives and people with lots of money.
In contrast, the creation of a network that allowed an ordinary programmer to recruit open-source contributions to his project and to easily deploy server and client software of his own design required massive outlays of capital over 3 decades. It easy for such massive outlays to go awry in various ways. The US government avoided its going awry. In contrast, the French government retained so much centralized control over Minitel that at no point in Minitel's history could an ordinary programmer have used Minitel to create something as innovative as the web.
(It wasn't until the internet had been almost completely turned over to the private sector in the early 1990s, for example, that any software started to track users more than absolutely necessary for the operation of the network: in the early 1990s, anyone could send and email with president@whitehouse.gov in the "From" field. The reason it worked that way was to maximize anonymity of senders. There was no way for the sender of an email in the early 1990s to know whether the recipient read it, the reason again being a desire among the designers and maintainers of the infrastructure to maximize privacy.)
Of the major browsers which are non-US based? Hint: not the majority. The point the op was making had nothing to do with your response claiming the US is the "only ruler of the internet".
Does the US do a poor job of regulation of monopolies in tech? You don't have to look hard to find supporters of that statement. But we're at a point in time where things are finally starting to bubble up and garner traction. Will it be perfect in the short term? Definitely not. But I'm hopeful the US can and will bring their portion of the blame back into check which is advantageous to a sum
that's greater than simply the US.
As an alternative, modern web framework for Clojure, I recommend Coast https://coastonclojure.com/ (I have no other affiliation to this project other than using it myself).
You used to have to go online every 30 days (or something) else they would expire. Is that no longer the case?
Also, it used to be 10,000 across 3 devices and bizarrely only 333 on each device (even if you only used one device)! I think they have since fixed that.
This is all ramping up to Disney's own streaming platform. To which, as a Marvel fan, I will of course subscribe. It's just unfortunate that the streaming world starts to saturate, because of $.
