yes, if I know the person (i.e. my Cal. friend), I can connect to the host by manually entering the IP number.

but what happens if I don't know the IP number of any member of the "regional" subnetwork i want to connect to?

some sort of regional hostcache only providing IP numbers of a designated "origin"- be it geographical or `virtual´- would come in handy.

i.e. only being provided a list of hostnames ending with *.jp would be a great help to really connect to machines actually situated in Japan and (hopefully) hosting the desired content.
same filtering could be done with almost any gTLD.

hey perhaps that could be a feature of the clients themselves- there should be a switch that forces the programme only to connect to clients from a certain gTLD.

n