had some free time this past weekend and found a cheap air fare, so I decided to hop on a jet and spend the weekend with my friend Mike, who works at a large computer company in Grenoble, France.
Mike is an American, and he's been living the life of the high-tech expatriate for the past four years. As with a growing number of Americans living overseas, it's a lifestyle that's helped out, in no small part, by the Internet.
I showed up at Mike's house with a small overnight bag and my laptop. Although we had planned a heady weekend of fancy French restaurants and hang-gliding, I also had a lot of work that I needed to do. So on Saturday morning I sat down at Mike's dining-room table, took out my laptop, and plugged the power supply into the wall. Then I took out my Ethernet card and plugged it into Mike's local area network.
A few years ago, just blindly plugging US electrical equipment into European sockets was a surefire recipe for disaster. That's because France, and most other European nations, deliberately built incompatibilities into their consumer technologies as a way to promote national interests. Europeans use different voltages for residential power than the United States, a different television format (more than one, in fact), and even different telephone plugs.
For years, international travelers had to carry a collection of transformers, plugs, and other adapters to make their US gadgets work overseas. And travelers could forget about bringing a videotape from the United States and showing it on a French or British television: Whereas US videotapes are mastered in the NTSC format, France uses a video standard called SECAM, and Britain uses a system called PAL.
Today these intentional technical incompatibilities have largely been overcome. My laptop, as well as Mike's desktop computer, has a multivoltage power supply that can run on the 100-volt electricity that is common in Japan, the 115 volts that is standard in the United States, and the 230-volt current that dominates Europe. Mike also has a multiformat VCR that can play videotapes in NTSC, PAL or SECAM formats.
Thankfully, the Internet's engineers were never forced by their governments to build incompatibilities into the system. From the beginning, the Internet has stressed compatibility. The Ethernet we have in the United States is exactly the same as the Ethernet in Europe; the RJ45 plugs are the same; the signaling voltages on the Ethernet wires are the same, and the protocols are the same. When I plugged in my laptop, my computer asked Mike's computer for an Internet address, learned the address of Mike's gateway, and put me on the Net. His ISP connection (the equivalent of $12.50 a month for unlimited access) gave me faster access to my e-mail on Martha's Vineyard than many dial-ups I've used from California.
Unfortunately, while the Internet's designers have done a great job building a global network, software vendors, and Web site designers in the United States still build many of their systems for a domestic audience, not an international one.
Consider advertising. Most Americans don't seem to mind the ads on the Internet - after all, banner advertisements have brought us free Web search engines, free e-mail, and free on-line references. But Mike hates banner advertisements, because he has to pay France Telecom for the time his computer spends downloading the images. That's because in France, as in the rest of Europe, the telephone system has no such thing as unlimited local calling. France Telecom charges Mike roughly $3 an hour for a call (ISDN or otherwise) during the day, and $1 an hour evenings and weekends. Overall, his connection to the Internet can cost $50 per month in addition to his ISP - and even more when he has friends like me visiting from America and downloading huge files.
Mike does most of his banking over the Internet, using Quicken and his broker's Web site. He bought his copy of Quicken over the Web and downloaded it electronically, which saved both time and shipping. But he ran into problems when he tried to register the program. Intuit, the publisher of Quicken, demanded that he give a US address with a state, a five-digit ZIP-code, and a 10-digit phone number. In Grenoble, Mike has a six-character postal code that starts with the letter ''F'' and a nine-digit phone number (although it does run to 10 digits, beginning with a zero, if you dial it in France). He ended up registering the program using his father's address back home.
This problem isn't unique to Quicken. Many sites on the Web require people to register before using them. Mike and other Internet users in Europe can't help but feel offended when a Web site demands city, state and Zip Code.
The Internet is widely popular among Mike's fellow ex-pats, he says. They use it to keep in touch with friends at home and keep up with their hometown news. But it's less popular among the French. When Mike's auto mechanic told him that new brake pads would cost $120, Mike asked the man why he didn't go on the Internet and find a better price. ''He said that the Internet is all in English, and he doesn't read English,'' Mike told me.
So Mike went on line himself, found a Toyota dealer in the United States that would sell him the pads for $27 plus $20 for international shipping, and ordered a set. He had them in less than two weeks.
Things are changing, of course. For example, the hang-gliding school where I went flying Saturday afternoon now has its own Web site, which is attracting so many students that the site pays for itself. You can find it on line at http://www.chez.com/prevoldelta/.
Simson L. Garfinkel has set up a Web-based chat system for readers of this column. The address is http://chat.simson.net /
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