The Internet Is Fracturing Into Separate Country-Specific Networks

[Commentary] The World Wide Web celebrated its 25th birthday recently. Today the global network serves almost 3 billion people, and hundreds of thousands more join each day.

If the Internet were a country, its economy would be among the five largest in the world. Yet all of this growth and increasing connectedness, which can seem both effortless and unstoppable, is now creating enormous friction, as yet largely invisible to the average surfer. Fierce and rising geopolitical conflict over control of the global network threatens to create a balkanized system -- what some technorati, including Google’s executive chairman, Eric Schmidt, have called “the splinternet.”

Some experts anticipate a future with a Brazilian Internet, a European Internet, an Iranian Internet, an Egyptian Internet -- all with different content regulations and trade rules, and perhaps with contrasting standards and operational protocols. Whether or not this fragmentation can be managed is up to question, but at a minimum, this patchwork solution would be disruptive to American companies like Google, Facebook, Amazon, and eBay, which would see their global reach diminished. And it would make international communications and commerce more costly.