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I was voting this up right up, right until the line that says: "When 99.9% of site visitors are from the United States, it is not impolite to list the United States at the top of the list, and even have it preselected."

Firstly, I doubt you could name a single website (other than possibly US utilities or government sites) which had that proportion of users from the USA. That makes this an exaggerated argument, and so highly questionable in my opinion.

Secondly, when you preselect data (with guesses or unreliable IP location lookups) you're filling in your own form.based on your own assumptions. If clean data is in any way important to you then you must not pre-select data.

By all means add the USA to the top, USian users have come to expect it and some would probably be confused if it wasn't there, but pre-select at your peril.

Good point, but certainly SOMETHING has to be preselected. Forgive my horrible, madeup statistics of 99.9%.