Cultural issues in planet-wide Internet management and administration

The Internet nowadays reflects various cultural axioms, mostly derived from the culture in which it originally developed (the American academic/research environment). Analyses of these issues have in the past focused only on low-level aspects, like the choice of language (and its consequences, e.g. defining the related character set). An attempt is made in this paper to prove that cultural axioms have strongly influenced many technical aspects of the Internet, such as the domain name mechanism, various mail exchange protocols, the standard definition process, the lack of a hierarchical network structure and the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). Some of these technical aspects are analyzed in depth, and their relation to the cultural axioms influencing them is shown. Obstacles to a global expansion of the Internet (due to these cultural mechanisms) are discussed, and a possible way of shielding the Internet's technical aspects from cultural axioms is presented.