It is an "afterthought" rather than a premeditated "plot". It
happens e-tailer by e-tailer, one Web site after the other,
like the spread of a virus.
Consider these two - by no means exhaustive - examples.
Amazon and Geocities (now, Yahoo!Geocities) are two Internet
establishments, two gigantic communities of users that,
between them, represent a sizable chunk of all the activity on
the Internet.
It has long been impossible for a non-US publisher to sell its
wares (books, for instance) through Amazon or to Amazon
directly. Amazon works exclusively with US publishers and
distributors. To collaborate with Amazon - one of the members
of a duopoly as far as B2C e-commerce goes - a non-US
publisher (no matter how substantial) has to work with a US
distributor and thus forgo a large portion of its revenues
(payable to the distributor as commissions). Moreover, said
publisher cannot even open a ZShop (Amazon's version of mom
and pop store). One has to be a US resident to do so. Amazon
is closed to the outside world, despite its (false) global
image.
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