The Internet has been sharing -- if not hogging -- the spotlight in discussions of the President's behavior, but most commentators have focused on domestic consumption. What effect will the glut of detail from Starr's report have on be on the millions of Internet users in other places? Andrew Robinson, a freelance writer, worked as a consultant on Internet-related issues in Bangladesh and India for three years.

Despite its data super-highways, sophisticated satellites and the ability to transmit photos from Mars to Marseille, America is completely out of touch with the rest of the world.

The decision to publish the lurid details of President Clinton's personal life on the Internet confirms the fact once and for all.

Newt Gingrich, once a cyber-sheriff protecting the Net from nastiness, now justifies the government's porno-spill, "Every citizen should be informed. Every citizen should be paying attention." What he seems to forget is that 1) many, maybe even most, of the people using the Internet these days are not American, and 2) a large proportion of Internet users, no matter where they live, are far from old enough to be citizens.

Although it reaches most countries, the Internet has always been an American-made web. Even in a culturally remote country like Bangladesh, the Internet insists on its American mannerisms.

I discovered this in 1994, when I went to Bangladesh as part of a team sent to help introduce Internet-based technologies. No matter how hard we tried, the network refused to speak the local language. And Bangladeshi computer users were much too enamored of the wonders of the World Wide Web (whatever it was, whatever it did) to worry about local protocols and language compatibility.

The network insisted on taking water-surfeited Bangladeshis "surfing," on making them learn the meaning of the word "cool," on teaching them to express themselves through a single web page. "I'm the kind of person who...." "On weekends I like to..." "Click here to see my..."

No matter how hard we tried to coax the network to provide needed information on health care or agriculture or the Bangladeshi community overseas, the Internet demanded the right to exhibit itself, to entertain large audiences, to celebrate the great American Song of Myself.

For every web site explaining how to prevent a woman from dying during childbirth, another attempted to make money from some portion of a woman's anatomy. In its introduction to Bangladesh, the Internet belched and spat, it wanted to get drunk and make crude jokes -- the ultimate sex-tourist.

Bangladesh, like many countries, is a socially conservative, family-centered, Islamic nation with no allegiance to American ideas of free speech. Any moves toward a free press or uncensored Internet links or cheap satellite connections are gestures the impoverished country must make to gain entry into the U.S.-sponsored free-market. Bangladeshi media are about as likely to run an article detailing a sex scandal as the American media would be to run the sort of religious-based articles commonly found in South Asia -- on the importance of prayer, or honoring one's parents, or (more apropos) the benefits of sexual abstinence.

Bangladeshis expressed concern about cultural pollution, and I sympathized -- but I never expected it would come from the U.S. government. Nor did I expect the government -- with all its web sites on pharmaceutical regulations and cyclone patterns and carcinogenic pesticides -- would dump its waste into international cyber-waters on such a scale. A repulsive, pervasive, stain of a publication, large enough to sully a million dresses -- now just a click away from any major web page.

Many Americans think the world is getting smaller, with a MacDonald's menu, a Bay Watch episode, and instructions for washing Beanie Babies in every language.

But the only thing that is shrinking is the American idea of the world -- something that makes the life of the Bangladeshi teenager who wears Nike shoes, or the Iraqi businessman speaking on a cell phone, so agonizingly inaccessible and easy to misunderstand.

With the Internet, all the world may become more familiar with the sex acts of President Clinton, but we may also find ourselves missing a certain melody, a certain simplicity. And it may be that what we've lost is lost forever, and that the simple melodic sensation was much more valuable than any democratic principle or right to be informed.