Re: Global operating system
I would actually suggest that it's actually more fundamental than that.
In countries that descend from the common law tradition the basis of our laws is written that you are free to do anything that you wish to do, apart from specified things that are prohibited by laws defining what you can't do.
In other parts of the world (and even Europe, ie the Code Civil the basis of the laws is that everything is prohibited unless permitted by law.
This leads to things like this:-
https://www.thelocal.fr/20140521/french-teen-drone-flight-film-fine/
ie; French kid films really good promotional video of his town; gets prosecuted and fined for doing it without a permit and considers emigrating to a less restrictive country. In western countries he'd probably have had a job offer from a media agency instead.
That is a minor and almost spurious example, but the basic architecture and philosophy behind the internet was written by people who had been raised in our society and this does actually matter; it's why SMTP just sends emails from any mail server to any mailserver and is pretty much totally decentralised. If a totalitarian country had of developed email then the system design would probably have required you to route your emails via the government post office which would be delivered them when they'd read them and approved the content. DNS is pretty uncontrollable by the state; what would it have looked like if China had of developed it?
What might the next generation of platforms look like if people raised in a dictatorship designed even the basic architecture to be used?
Biting the hand that feeds IT
