Having lived for a while now in a small country, whose content for the most part is encrypted into a language only a few million people can read, I can assure you that there is nontheless alot of traffic flowing into the eyeballs of people living there (even though it's in other languages including unencrypted American), and the vast majority of that flow is paid for by the people living in that small country, whether they're paying-to-see or paying-to-be-seen. The heavy politics are all in who gets what piece of that cash flow. CNN has a local organization maintaining translated and locally-written material, for what it's worth. And anyway, with Akamizing and AOLephanting and so forth going on all over the place, they're a bad example for many other reasons. (Not least of which is that I get better news coverage elsewhere). But who would care if Bill's Bait Shop in California stopped being able to talk to a local national provider? And who would pay to fix that connectivity, if it were fixable only through the application of money? Who knows? (I'll take yer 50 cents though, Bill). Anyway, the whole idea of universal connectivity is a complete myth. Even when the connectivity is advertised at any given moment, it's not necessarily there. Multihoming in practice quickly reveals that "full routes" are not the same size and do not lead to the same goodput, as noted in part by Valdis. Sean.