> Also, they didn't notice before? Not like internet people should have never heard of his name.
One of the craziest things about the internet to me is that everyone treats their experience of “the internet” as THE experience of “THE internet” like it’s one singular conception that we all enjoy. But, the internet is huge and diverse and full of distinct niches such that no two “internets” (as conceived of as an individual’s experience of it) are almost ever close to the same. The idea that surely the good people at ICANN would know this guy (I certainly didn’t) is so striking to me as derivative of this.
I notice this a lot, e.g. I have no idea what Internet the people in India are seeing because I barely ever seem to meet them online. But this is an American organisation, you can't tell me The Pirate Bay is something unknown there. The lawsuits against it were equally big news there, from what I gathered. Someone might still have missed it, and I'm sure my mom will have, but then my mom doesn't work for one of the Internet's core infrastructure organisations and doesn't handle applications where you need to check for fraud on the Internet.
I’m American and know of TPB, doesn’t mean I know who its founders are! The lawsuits were never particularly big news in my experience. I honestly don’t even specifically know what or when TPB was in active legal hot water nor do I have any idea on outcome. I have a vague idea that it probably happened at some point but only because I know that TPB enabled piracy. I remember more specifically individuals getting in trouble for using TPB than anyone creating TPB getting in trouble.
I’ve also heard of Pinterest for example but barely know the product and definitely don’t know the founders.
What’s more, you’re committing the same perspective but just at a slightly different scale. What I said originally about fractured internet experiences is also totally true if you restrict to American users! Plenty of American users of the internet are highly frequently so but don’t pirate, for example!
That’s quite the straw man. Like, I didn’t even mention anything about web search so that’s a really quite the attempt at reconfiguring my argument into something comical to mock. What’s more, the story is pretty explicit that they did look into the guys background and discovered his past, probably via web search. I was talking about the assumption that the people at ICANN should have known this “famous” person before that.
One of the craziest things about the internet to me is that everyone treats their experience of “the internet” as THE experience of “THE internet” like it’s one singular conception that we all enjoy. But, the internet is huge and diverse and full of distinct niches such that no two “internets” (as conceived of as an individual’s experience of it) are almost ever close to the same. The idea that surely the good people at ICANN would know this guy (I certainly didn’t) is so striking to me as derivative of this.