This typically involves dealing with customs and other bureaucracies that are not geared to the efficiency standards assumed by the network economy. As an aside, there is some fear of the day when customs officials do understand the Internet and attempt to tax or regulate international movement of information. Let's hope that politicians realize that doing so would hurt the productiveness of the network economy and thus reduce the world economy by much more than the potential revenue stream they can recover. Despite these problems, international reach is one of the greatest promises of the network economy. By connecting a vast pool of users in a single system, the Web allows even the most specialized need to be met.
Most countries are slightly behind the U.S. on the Internet maturity curve.
This does not mean that all American sites are better than all overseas sites. On the contrary, most U.S. sites are worthless , exactly because the U.S. is ahead and thus has more companies online. It seems to be a law of nature that everybody makes the same mistakes the first time they launch a website, and many American companies continue to waste millions of dollars on bloated designs that contradict all available usability studies. Even so, many of these companies recognize the error of their ways after a few years of low hit rates and irate user email and redesign their sites to be faster and more useful. Thus, since the U.S. has more companies that have been on the Web for a long time, it also has more decent sites.