It would be unimaginable. Unthinkable. Only making my blog available to people using the internet from within The Netherlands. Imagine you would only be able to visit websites hosted in your own country. This would drastically change the way and scale we use the internet. For me the internet is global. A place where you don’t have to think about borders, continents or countries.
So my biggest frustration is that I’m still (we are living in 2012, the internet is around for over 20 years now!) unable to access certain content. Content that is available to roughly 312,928,899 people, but not to me.

Netflix:
Sorry, Netflix is not available in your country… yet
Hulu:
Sorry, currently our video library can only be watched from within the United States.
Amazon:
We have detected that you are not located within the US. Due to licensing restrictions Amazon Instant Video customers must be located in the United States when viewing videos online.
These are not the words I like to read when browsing the web. And, yes I know, Netflix, Hulu and Amazon had tough negotiations with book publishers, record labels and people from Hollywood to get the rights to publish their content in the United States. But don’t stop there. Netflix and Hulu are promising me to email me when their service becomes available outside the United States for almost 3 years now. And don’t get met started about Amazon. Amazon, you used to be the king of personalization and targeting. Why keep promoting a Prime account and after signing up let me discover I cannot watch videos, follow TV shows or even borrow books since i’m not located in the US? You already knew that.
Talking about this with other people, the most of the time offer me a solution: start using a American VPN to trick the system. But that doesn’t solve the problem. I want to same benefits and features on my Kindle as my American friends have (lending!). I dont want to wait months before a movies hits the theaters here in Amsterdam. I want to see the latest episode of Breaking Bad before somebody posts a spoiler on Twitter. I want easy access to content, everywhere. I want the promise of the borderless internet becoming a reality.






Mijn Nokia N95 heeft al een tijdje kuren. De batterij is binnen 24 uur leeg en vaak als ik wil bellen moet ik eerst hardhandig de batterij verwijderen om een harde reboot te forceren voordat het maken van een connectie mogelijk is. Dit lijkt mij niet te kloppen voor een telefoon die minder dan een jaar oud is. Een bericht naar de klantenservice van KPN vertelde mij dat dit inderdaad niet klopt, dit hoort niet bij mijn telefoon en zeker niet al binnen een jaar. De vriendelijke vrouw van de KPN, die ook netjes de volgende werkdag reageerde, 