As much as Yahoo Search and Google Local would have you believe the Web can be local, it's not. The Web is international–if your grandmother opens a blog, it can be seen by every netizen around the world (so long as there is no block of her IP address…). There is no privacy on the Internet, unless you hide behind password-protected sites or take your server off the grid.

So when an article like this, "The 50 Most Important People on the Web", is unveiled, it always makes me shake my head and ask why they don't say instead, "The 50 Most Important People on the American Web" or "The 50 Most Important People on the English-language Web".

What makes this list worst (though I agree with many of the listings of American people), is that they do try to internationalize it with inclusion of a few Korean, Chinese and Iraqi (huh??) people.

For China, Alibaba's Jack Ma is included. But what about Charles Zhang or the legions of other Chinese netrepreneurs who, generally, brought foreign business models to the Chinese Internet masses?

When lists like this are made, it's for foreign consumption, but it only shows a small sliver of the activity going on through the tubes of the Internet.