Quartz

“The Internet is creating a global community,” a thought leader probably said recently. But take a closer look at Internet traffic data, and the theory that the web is turning the world into a borderless digital utopia doesn’t hold up.

There’s no question that Internet traffic in general is skyrocketing. And more of this data crosses borders than ever before. Global flows in a digital age, a report released by McKinsey Global Institute, attempts to quantify the circulation of three major types of “flows”: financial, human, and digital.

Using data from TeleGeography, McKinsey estimates that the total transfer of data across borders has increased 20-fold from 2005 to 2012, from 2.2 trillion megabytes per second to over 41 trillion. This is a dramatic rise, no doubt, but a little context makes it clear that data flow -- or the growth of that flow -- is not inherently international. In fact, cross-border web traffic has barely kept up with the sum total of Internet activity. The vast majority of digital transactions are still domestic.

[Commentary] 2014 marks the 15th anniversary of the launch of Napster, the file sharing service that disrupted the music business and conditioned a generation of consumers to expect to be able to listen to their favorite songs for free.

Pandora has been seeking to lower the amount it pays to publishers in royalties to be in line with that paid by terrestrial radio stations -- 1.7% of gross annual revenue.

The American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) has been seeking to increase rates to as high as 3% of Pandora’s gross revenue, citing the much higher rates paid by other digital services, such as Spotify. The court ended up ruling in March 2014 that the rate would stay unchanged at 1.85%.

But the tactics used by the music industry against Pandora were the really interesting part. But one piece of information about the songs in the Genome Project library -- “the most sophisticated taxonomy of musical information ever collected” according to Pandora -- remains lacking: Who actually owns them. And for Pandora, this would soon prove to be a massive problem.

In November 2012, Pandora commenced legal action to get the dispute with ASCAP resolved. Mindful of the fact that if they did not come to an agreement with Sony, which owned the rights to large swathes of music in Pandora’s play catalog, Pandora in early November 2012 requested from both Sony and ASCAP a list of Sony tracks available for license so it could remove them from its service.

According to the ruling, Sony “quite deliberately” withheld this information to weaken Pandora’s hand in the negotiations. A couple of months later, Universal also withdrew its digital rights from ASCAP, seeking a similar outcome. ASCAP denies that it was involved in any “troubling,” coordinated behavior against Pandora. But it is clear that this fight is far from over.

Somalia’s first terrestrial fiber optic cables have connected the country to the modern Internet.

The BBC reported that Somalis have been in “culture shock” ever since. “They’re very excited about the speed,” a spokesman from Somalia Wireless, an Internet service provider (ISP), told the BBC, which reports that: People have been flocking to hotels and Internet cafes to try out the fast service -- some seeing video platforms like YouTube and social networking sites for the first time, our correspondent says.

Until recently, Internet connectivity in Somalia came exclusively through dial-up modems and satellite. Then, Internet providers rolled out fiber optic connections in nation’s capital, Mogadishu. The cables run though Somalia’s neighbor, Kenya, which hooked up the first of four undersea cables in 2009.

The numbers: Google reported first quarter net income of $3.45 billion, slightly up on 2013, but well shy of consensus estimates for $4.3 billion, according to FactSet.

Revenue was $15.4 billion, up 19% on 2013, but only $12.2 billion once commissions paid to partners for traffic were taken out. FactSet expectations were for revenue of $12.4 billion, after the partner commissions. With a miss on both profit and revenue, Google shares have sunk by about 6% in after-hours trade.

The takeaway: The average cost per click for advertisements (a measure of how much Google charges advertisers in its auction-based systems) fell by 9% during the quarter, while traffic acquisition costs -- the amount it pays to partners for traffic (for example to Apple for default Google searches via the Safari browser on iPhones) rose to $3.23 billion compared to $2.96 billion in 2013.

One of the byproducts of Americans’ ongoing love affair with the automobile is the enduring strength of their relationship with radio -- especially the old-fashioned terrestrial (AM/FM) kind.

While the number of Americans that listen to some AM/FM radio has shrunk marginally over the past decade, it has also remained firmly above the 90% threshold -- an astonishing level of penetration when you consider the number of alternatives (MP3s, streaming music services, satellite radio) that have emerged over that period.

And old fashioned radio continues to trounce the most comparable of those -- satellite radio and Internet radio -- in terms of its share of listening hours. Business wise, it’s a similar story.

According to analysis by Macquarie Capital, terrestrial radio’s share of the advertising market since 2011 has remained fairly stable at about 10%, in contrast to the sharp falls experienced by other legacy media segments like newspapers and magazines. It’s arguably best explained by the fact that most listening takes place in the car, where old fashioned AM/FM radio still reigns supreme. 44% of all radio listening takes place in the car, where terrestrial radio has an 80% share, according to Macquarie.

The founder of free online learning platform edX, set up by Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), has spoken out against the US State Department’s decision to block people in Iran, Cuba and Sudan from accessing a new advanced course on aircraft design.

“I believe that all our courses should be freely available. I believe it does not make sense to block any courses from embargoed nations,” said Anant Agarwal, president of edX and professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT. In early March, edX discovered the US government was going to block the Flight Vehicle Aerodynamics course offered by MIT.

“Right now on EdX, of the 160 courses on our platform, one course is blocked, that’s the advanced aeronautics course to the embargoed nations.” Agarwal, speaking at the Global Education and Skills conference in Dubai, said it was “possible that certain other very advanced courses might be impacted”. Other US-based providers of massive online learning courses -- known as MOOCs -- such as Coursera and Udacity have already had their courses blocked from students in nations under US sanctions.

[Commentary] I spent a week tethering my computer to the mobile Internet connection on my phone. It was awful. I wholeheartedly recommend it.

It took people in rich countries several years to crawl from achingly slow dial-up connections (remember those?) to ISDN lines, to true broadband. It is by now conventional wisdom that the next billion (or two billion or five billion) people to come online will do so using smartphones and mobile broadband. Indeed, it is already happening.

Yet many of these new Internet users suffer from obstacles such as intermittent electricity supply, expensive data plans (compared to average local wages), a lack of local content or language support, outdated devices and weak or non-existent financial infrastructure. Worst of all, they must put up with achingly slow Internet connections. Anybody who cares about the Internet or wants to understand how it should evolve in the coming years would do well to understand how the vast majority of the world uses it, which I did.

In one week, I consumed 4 gigabytes of data, or about as much as a DVD holds. When I got back on (50Mbps!) broadband, I used 2 gigabytes in 24 hours. YouTube became a no-go zone. It worked, but loaded slowly and paused to buffer constantly. Spotify wasn’t great either, mostly because I was generally also trying to load other things for work at the same time. It quickly became clear that I was better off listening, on repeat, to the very few MP3s on my computer. Netflix, Hulu and iPlayer? I didn’t even try. They were slow enough with my previous connection -- top speed 14Mbps -- for me to know that there was no point. Mobile broadband, despite the name, simply isn’t up to scratch for the modern web.

Augmented reality browsers use a mobile phone’s camera to digest a scene and annotate it with web-connected flair: live directions, geotagged tweets, reviews that hover over restaurants.

But the current generation of AR browsers is lagging on geolocation, are content-poor, and have limited interactivity, according to a recent paper (paywall) in the Proceedings of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE).

Geographic certitude is at the core of everything an AR browser does. Seamless AR browsing has to integrate sensor data from GPS (location); body direction (compass); and pose, or where the device is pointed (gyroscope and accelerometer). The Austrian team says that the current level of consumer-grade hardware can’t deliver all of this accurately, and that future AR browsers can overcome this by being more clever about the way they use computational resources.

There was no breakout mobile app, no hot new startup, no celebrity founder holding court over the conference. But everywhere one turned at South By Southwest Interactive, people were talking about television.

Time Warner’s HBO had a much larger presence than previous years, including the most acclaimed and widely discussed exhibit at the conference. Media executives on one panel grumbled about web authentication systems for TV subscribers.

Jimmy Kimmel sniffed, “The fact of the matter is, the amount of money we make from selling commercials on television, is 100 times as much from what we make from people watching our YouTube videos. And until those things even out somewhat, we’re going to be focused on television.”