"On the face of it, the Internet appears to make geography obsolete. But the reality is rather more complicated. If you want a high-speed digital-subscriber line (DSL) connection, for example, geographical proximity to a telephone exchange is vital, because DSL only works over relatively short distances. Similarly, go to retrieve a large software update from an online file library, and you will probably be presented with a choice of countries from which to download it; choosing a nearby country will usually result in a faster transfer. And while running an e-business from a mountain-top sounds great, it is impractical without a fast connection or a reliable source of electricity. The supposedly seamless Internet is, in other words, constrained by the realities of geography. According to Martin Dodge of University College London, who is an expert on Internet geography, "the idea that the Internet liberates you from geography is a myth".

redux [04.02.01]
eCompany Does Geography Matter Online?

""All politics is local," the late Massachusetts congressman Tip O'Neill once quipped. It turns out that the old saw is also true of e-commerce.

Cruise by a Nordstrom in Seattle on a misty spring day and the beige mannequins might be wearing yellow raincoats and duck boots. Three thousand miles away in Boca Raton, the Nordstrom window might showcase dolls dressed in floral-pattern bikinis and sunglasses. But at Nordstrom.com you get the same sell whether you log on from soggy Seattle or sunny Boca.

That's because, in our rush to get online, we've forgotten that some of the rules of real-world selling still apply on the Web. Geography matters -- online and off."

The New York Times E-Commerce: Borders Returning to the Internet
[requires 'free' registration]

"But for auction sites, gambling sites and others, geography is becoming increasingly important, because they must treat people from different locations differently, as is the case with the French government's barring the sale of Nazi-related items to its citizens.

Online advertising companies, too, are increasingly desperate to use geographic targeting tools to reinforce their clients' faith in Internet marketing. In short, for a growing number of companies, this will be the year when the borderless Internet economy becomes an outmoded concept.

"Our customers told us over the past six months or so that it was an absolute requirement that we have geo-targeting," said Mark Joseph, chief technology officer for MediaPlex, an advertising company based in San Francisco."

Marketing Computers IPMapper Literally Targets Online Users

"Caimis Geo's IPMapper service permits web sites the ability to accurately identify IP addresses to geographic locations.

Online marketers can know exactly where their customers are, says Daniel Westrick, director of Caimis Geo. "Right now people have crude web logging applications," he adds, which only identify obvious foreign codes on domain names.

IPMapper permits sites to discern a users location accurate to the city. "It gives you a pretty good idea of where your traffic is coming from," he says."

redux [10.07.00]
Internet Geography Project: Putting place back in cyberspace Overview

"This project arose in response to one of the great myths or the Internet age, i.e. the coming of cyberspace heralds the end physical constraints which will eventually lead to the death of cities. In fact, the exact opposite is occurring. The largest concentrations of Internet users and producers are located in urban areas and many of the most innovative firms in the Internet space are housed in downtowns. There should be nothing surprising about this since, cities have always been the primary source of innovation and will continue to play this role in the future.

Although the power of the Internet does opens up new possibilities for long-range collaboration and even new spaces of interaction within cyberspace it also exhibits much of the traditional unevenness that has characterized urban and economic development throughout history. The fact that information can be easily and widely distributed is often mistaken for an indication that the production of this information is also diffused. In fact, there is a much more complicated dynamic involving the connection of specific places to global networks resulting in a system of production that is both place-rooted and networked at the same time.