In order to make the world wide web truly world wide, a method and apparatus is provided such that accesses to a world wide web home page can be responded to with a home page adapted to the language or dialect that is most likely to to match the native language or dialect of the user. To provide this, the user's country code, numerical node address, or the user's client system address is matched in a database to provide the most likely language. Other languages may be selected if the choice is incorrect and the database will remember that selection for future accesses. Further, since some data transmissions are regulated by national law, the user and client location information is used by the server to prevent the server or the client from violating their respective national laws.