Discrimination Based on Geography on the Web

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/27/technology/start-ups/27global.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&em

The Web is growing, plain and simple. However, the Web seems to be growing even stronger in developing countries. So what's the problem with this? Companies who reach out to these developing areas use a lot of bandwidth, which is costly to the company, and return very little to no revenue. Because of this, companies are putting a limit on how much they reach out to these companies and are focusing on using their bandwidth in areas that will give them a higher profit. The article above goes into more detail about this and how different countries are responding to it.

How does this relate to what we're learning in class? The Watts and Strogatz model uses clustering and shows the strength of weak and strong ties in a network, in this case, the Web. Companies worry about this clustering and how it affects their business. So, in a sense, the weak ties could potentially be cut off or at a disadvantage in comparison to the main money making cluster of people.

Cornell Info 2040 - Networks

This article actually references the same article that Kristina mentioned. The rich get richer model that we discussed in class makes sense in that if a site gets more users, the site typically gets more useful (this is especially true for blogs and things like Facebook). More and more people then join because of the utility, creating a positive feedback loop, or the rich get richer model.

But it turns out, some of the last users that are being reached by the site do not contribute financially to the site for two reasons:
1) they are expensive to reach due to bandwidth issues; they are located in regions with poor infrastructure
2) they often do not have much disposable income, preventing advertising from becoming successful

This is an example of how the rich get richer model might work in theory, but in real life, it's actually only accurate under certain conditions.