RE: Moving Domains Tomasino writes about moving away from internet hosting services based in the USA: gopher://gopher.black/1/phlog/20250211-moving-domains Slugmax echos this and links to other's responses: gopher://republic.circumlunar.space/0/~slugmax/phlog/2025-02-12-ditching-the-states I sort-of don't get it. Maybe it's because I'm somewhat right-wing on economic policy (although not right-wing enough on social policy to like Trump overall). I prefer in general to deal with companies owned and operated from my own country, Australia. It retains the wealth within the local economy, and companies have to follow local laws, unlike say China where everything from IP law to the liberties of its people are thouroughly ignored in order to undercut businesses in the nations that they sell to. China was also in a trade war with Australia until recently, entirely banning imports of various products for which they were the largest export market for Australia, seemingly in order to intimidate politicians after our government took a skeptical view of their response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Nobody here talked about avoiding Chinese goods, services, or companies. In fact the Chinese BYD car company launched in Australia and rapidly rose to popularity in the electric vehicle market, becoming the second biggest brand within a year of their 2022 introduction. At the same time as Chinese spying revelations, and Chinese naval vessles jumping around the edges of Australian waters around the coast. Granted it's near impossible not to support China when buying physical goods. The glasses frames I bought yesterday have "designed in Australia" written on them which almost certainly means they're _made_ in China, but digging through to specifics to find out if any were really made in Australia (highly unlikely) was too much to attempt while I was selecting those. I also decided to buy some sneekers to avoid wearing out my usual boots with my evening runs down the driveway. My boots actually are made in Australia, but sneekers, and certainly sneekers I can try on in a nearby town, no way, all made in China. The USA is a bit like that with online services, although small countries/companies can at least compete on a somewhat more level playing field with entirely digital services. I did find an Australian company for a domain registrar (and DNS host), although they pretty much hide that they're Australian to try and appeal to overseas customers, and even have their pricing in USD. You have to check the website of their parent company to tell that they're actually run from Melbourne. There's a tiny datacentre in a rural Austrlian city that'd be nice to use if I was willing to go from $1USD/month VPS hosting to hundreds of AUD/month for rack space there. But they're really out of my league, so I go with the cheap hosting from the American company of course. Also for my account with Oracle Cloud, albeit at an Australian datacentre, but since I'm using their free 'tier' I'm not sure if that counts or not since they're not actually making money off me. I don't think I have a paid subscription with any internet service for purely personal use, foreign or otherwise. For subscription services I think it's just: ISP, Domain Registrar/host, VPS host. The first two are Australian companies. For business, I've made thousands for PayPal, Ebay, and another American company. Elon Musk got his first boost of super-wealth out of his shares in PayPal when it was sold to Ebay, although apparantly he's sold out of it now. If I at least ditched PayPal on my own website in preference for processing credit card transactions through an Australian bank, the bank would still be dealing with, and sending fees to, Visa and Mastercard which are both American companies. I did previously try and support an Australian Ebay competitor called QuickSales, after years of laughable inactivity there (I don't think I ever got a sale, but I did buy one or two things) it finally closed down in 2018. It was cheaper than Ebay, but still most people didn't use it. Gumtree, a classifieds site owned by Ebay, has probably taken its place. But it's a poor substitute. The tariffs which are (maybe?) what's scaring people away from American services, are Trump's attempt to combat that sort of problem in America that I have with finding Australian goods/services in Australia. So I do understand the logic. In fact Australia had a real electronics industry until tariffs were removed here and imports from asia took over. Now electronics manufacturing here struggles to scale much larger than my own efforts from the spare bedrooms of my house. Whether that's for better or worse, it's hard to tell. Probably worse for me, but I obviously should be in some office cubicle writing reports that nobody reads for better paid people to wave about at meetings, or whatever the hell most people make lots more money doing instead these days (I really don't know, but I'm sure I couldn't handle it). Anyway the world survived with tariffs back then, and Australia survived the recent trade bans by the Chinese government even though everyone here kept on buying Chinese junk regardless. I don't see how people feel switching away from internet hosting services based in the USA is a relevent response. Also, on policies regarding the internet, I hate those of the Australian government as much as all the foreign governements of significance, so really I've been rather fond of anarchic hosts like this: http://web.archive.org/web/20230702090104/https://basehost.eu/ Except the guy running that was arrested: http://web.archive.org/web/20231104141009/https://basehost.eu/ https://lowendbox.com/blog/william-weber-arrested-in-croatia-over-gaza-related-terrorism/ I need my nation of Emailia complete with an army and navy to litterally fight for digital freedom: gopher://aussies.space/0/~freet/ideas/2021-08-14Project_Emailia.txt - The Free Thinker