I was responding to a comment arguing that LibGen is the largest collection of knowledge in human history, which I think is an overly romantic and totally incorrect take. It may be a very useful collection of knowledge to people in developing countries, but it simply is not larger than the collection of knowledge accessible via any first-world public library. Obviously not everyone has access to that, but again, that’s not what the comment I replied to was about, and not relevant to what I’m saying.
> but it simply is not larger than the collection of knowledge accessible via any first-world public library
How do you know or can quantify this? At a first approximation, libraries are finite in space while the internet is (for the purposes of this discussion) infinite. I'd agree with you if you had said something like Wikipedia was bigger than libgen (and probably not even then, as Wikipedia is merely a summary of primary sources, which would be theoretically contained in libgen).
Libgen originated in Russia, and its users are global. This is not a purely American issue.