What Happened to Cyberspace – Land Without Borders?

Don’t you just hate it when well-intentioned attempts to automate clever
little features of your tools make it impossible to configure them the
way you want? Once the Dowbrigade made the move to the Ecuadorian
ISP he will be using over the next two months, every time we go to our Google
bookmark, it takes us to Google-Ecuador!

Having written and taught a workshop we call "10 Things You Didn’t
Know About Google" about a thousand times, we knew how to set the default
language back to English. But in the list of national editions
on the Google preferences page, the one with all the flags, the flag
on the United States is missing! We can set our default to Google-Albania,
but not just plain Google!

We can’t even get to the American site manually. Every time
we erase the "ec" at the end of the URL it seems to start to load good
old Google (US version) – and then takes us back to Google-Ecuador!
We feel this may be affecting our search results and display order.
Does anyone know a way to get around this annoying "feature"?