RE: Moving Domains
Tomasino writes about moving away from internet hosting services
based in the USA:
gopher://gopher.black/1/phlog/20250211-moving-domains
Slugmax echos this and links to other's responses:
gopher://republic.circumlunar.space/0/~slugmax/phlog/2025-02-12-ditching-the-states
I sort-of don't get it. Maybe it's because I'm somewhat right-wing
on economic policy (although not right-wing enough on social policy
to like Trump overall). I prefer in general to deal with companies
owned and operated from my own country, Australia. It retains the
wealth within the local economy, and companies have to follow local
laws, unlike say China where everything from IP law to the
liberties of its people are thouroughly ignored in order to
undercut businesses in the nations that they sell to.
China was also in a trade war with Australia until recently,
entirely banning imports of various products for which they were
the largest export market for Australia, seemingly in order to
intimidate politicians after our government took a skeptical view
of their response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Nobody here talked
about avoiding Chinese goods, services, or companies. In fact the
Chinese BYD car company launched in Australia and rapidly rose to
popularity in the electric vehicle market, becoming the second
biggest brand within a year of their 2022 introduction. At the same
time as Chinese spying revelations, and Chinese naval vessles
jumping around the edges of Australian waters around the coast.
Granted it's near impossible not to support China when buying
physical goods. The glasses frames I bought yesterday have
"designed in Australia" written on them which almost certainly
means they're _made_ in China, but digging through to specifics to
find out if any were really made in Australia (highly unlikely) was
too much to attempt while I was selecting those. I also decided to
buy some sneekers to avoid wearing out my usual boots with my
evening runs down the driveway. My boots actually are made in
Australia, but sneekers, and certainly sneekers I can try on in a
nearby town, no way, all made in China.
The USA is a bit like that with online services, although small
countries/companies can at least compete on a somewhat more level
playing field with entirely digital services. I did find an
Australian company for a domain registrar (and DNS host), although
they pretty much hide that they're Australian to try and appeal to
overseas customers, and even have their pricing in USD. You have to
check the website of their parent company to tell that they're
actually run from Melbourne. There's a tiny datacentre in a rural
Austrlian city that'd be nice to use if I was willing to go from
$1USD/month VPS hosting to hundreds of AUD/month for rack space
there. But they're really out of my league, so I go with the cheap
hosting from the American company of course. Also for my account
with Oracle Cloud, albeit at an Australian datacentre, but since
I'm using their free 'tier' I'm not sure if that counts or not
since they're not actually making money off me.
I don't think I have a paid subscription with any internet service
for purely personal use, foreign or otherwise. For subscription
services I think it's just: ISP, Domain Registrar/host, VPS host.
The first two are Australian companies.
For business, I've made thousands for PayPal, Ebay, and another
American company. Elon Musk got his first boost of super-wealth out
of his shares in PayPal when it was sold to Ebay, although
apparantly he's sold out of it now. If I at least ditched PayPal on
my own website in preference for processing credit card
transactions through an Australian bank, the bank would still be
dealing with, and sending fees to, Visa and Mastercard which are
both American companies.
I did previously try and support an Australian Ebay competitor
called QuickSales, after years of laughable inactivity there (I
don't think I ever got a sale, but I did buy one or two things) it
finally closed down in 2018. It was cheaper than Ebay, but still
most people didn't use it. Gumtree, a classifieds site owned by
Ebay, has probably taken its place. But it's a poor substitute.
The tariffs which are (maybe?) what's scaring people away from
American services, are Trump's attempt to combat that sort of
problem in America that I have with finding Australian
goods/services in Australia. So I do understand the logic. In fact
Australia had a real electronics industry until tariffs were
removed here and imports from asia took over. Now electronics
manufacturing here struggles to scale much larger than my own
efforts from the spare bedrooms of my house. Whether that's for
better or worse, it's hard to tell. Probably worse for me, but I
obviously should be in some office cubicle writing reports that
nobody reads for better paid people to wave about at meetings, or
whatever the hell most people make lots more money doing instead
these days (I really don't know, but I'm sure I couldn't handle
it). Anyway the world survived with tariffs back then, and
Australia survived the recent trade bans by the Chinese government
even though everyone here kept on buying Chinese junk regardless. I
don't see how people feel switching away from internet hosting
services based in the USA is a relevent response.
Also, on policies regarding the internet, I hate those of the
Australian government as much as all the foreign governements of
significance, so really I've been rather fond of anarchic hosts
like this:
http://web.archive.org/web/20230702090104/https://basehost.eu/
Except the guy running that was arrested:
http://web.archive.org/web/20231104141009/https://basehost.eu/
https://lowendbox.com/blog/william-weber-arrested-in-croatia-over-gaza-related-terrorism/
I need my nation of Emailia complete with an army and navy to
litterally fight for digital freedom:
gopher://aussies.space/0/~freet/ideas/2021-08-14Project_Emailia.txt
- The Free Thinker
