Will the internet be 'broken up' one day?

DeluxeNames

The internet could one day be broken up into separate networks around the world, a leading source in the development of the net has warned.

Nitin Desai, chair of the Internet Governance Forum (IGF), set up by the UN, warned that concerns over the net's future could lead to separation.....

"If I look at the internet in five years from now there are going to be very, very, very more internet users in Asia than Europe or America.

"There will be more Chinese web pages than English pages....

"A large proportion of the internet users in China do not know the Latin alphabet.

"There are concerns about internationalised domain names in some countries who feel the debate is not moving fast enough."

He warned: "I think this is one of the key issues and if we don't address it with sufficient vigour we will get a Balkanisation of the net." ......
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6037345.stm

My take: I don't believe there is any doubt that the Chinese will one day create their own separate internet and there have been several credible news stories saying they plan to do just that. They want to control what their citizens see and they are not fully able to control the current internet.

No doubt other dissedent countries like North Korea will join the Chinese internet. Realistically, I don't think it will hurt the internet all that much becuase most users want to reach the largest audiene with their websites and I believe that the "Western World's" internet will still be bigger.

What do you think? Will the internet be broken up? Should the U.S. Government have so much control over it or should they turn it over to the United Nations?

LurkinBack

In my view even though the internet was founded on that mythical dream of all users interacting, the internet has already evolved into a segregated place.

Just look at the way things are, yes the internet opens up doors for people to find new hobbies and past times etc but all these things have their own little cliques and groups. If you get into the "public" section of the internet it's almost the same as real life, however social heirs and graces just dont apply to these places.

Webmasters who have little or no social skills (i inlude myself in this) are losing their place of sanctuary. Once again forced to hide in the background being the geeky ones that keep the whole thing running while the "cool" everyday people strut their stuff on the main page. These people are the ones that are biggotted, unreasonable, uncouth(always wanted to use that word) and most of all unwilling to mix with anyone different to themselves.

Eventually this is all going to lead to segregation and splitting of the internet with a small bit of "crossing over" between the different sections. But IMHO this is already the case it's just not on an international scale yet.

Nuvo

You know, when the .com boom was happening, the internet was owned by the big shots, but the developers were thought of as either utter nerds or gods.
When the bubble burst, the view of webmasters and designers generally fell, and many didn't bother saying that they were designers or developers.
In the last few years, the developers and designers have yet again become the people as services like MySpace and YouTube proove that knowing how to do thing online can make you incredible amounts of cash and get you places without starting out in some huge company.

Unfortunately, it looks as if we're going to be hit by oppressive governments such as China and North Korea, who want to put a limit on what people can do.
If it's the case that different area's have their own internets, I can see people finding ways around having to use them, and chances are that many companies such as ISP's will want to prevent any splitting as it will either lose them customers, or force them to purchase new tools to provide for the different locations, both of which will cause a loss of proffits.
Even if China does split off, I don't see this really hitting Western users unless they speak or indeed are Chinese as generally, such sites don't get that much traffic due to the language barrier (and services such as Google's translator don't do a brilliant job of translation due to them not truly understanding human language... they can translate words, but they can't turn them into truly meaningful content as one language might have words for which there's no direct translation).

There were talks of internet split up's a while ago when there were talks of allowing different companies the ability to control it in some form or another, and generally, many came to the conclusion that the only thing we would need to worry about is companies regulating access based on affiliates, meaning that if the site is offering a commercial e-mil app, but hasn't signed up with the service providing your internet, they won't be available to you.
With companies such as Google sort of fighting for user rights over money making money grabbers (I say "sort of" due to the whole China thing), someone could just launch a service that has no limiting and they'd probably win out.

I agree with Lurk to some degree, there's different groups who don't generally mix together apart from a few times when two area's cross over (such as someone reccomending an open source app to someone who doesn't really know much about computers, which is general users interacting with the nerd zone*), but typically, you could slot yourself into any number or positions since nobody knows who you are in real life unless you give yourself away some how.
While the internet isn't exactly closed off to anyone, it's often the case that if you're not in on something, you generally go on without noticing it unless it comes into the little bubble of sites you are interested in (for example, my parents use YouTube, but didn't know what Flickr is).

I don't worry about China splitting off from the rest of us as generally, I don't use those sites, though it would be a loss to both us and them as it would mean less users on the real internet and also, they would lose any access to new innovation from companies which might not be able to afford to also jump onto their system.
I don't have anything against Google for censoring their Chinese site as it's still giving China a great search engine and it's not half as bad as some things other companies have done to gain money (I'm looking at you Microsoft).

* The Nerd Zone is an internet based outer dimension filled with beings of with physical features, but higher I.Q. scores.
These beings usually appear humanoid and often have glasses, beards or weight problems.
They can usually be spotted by their unusually awful looking shirts and bizarre devil and penguin shaped pets.
They often hunt in groups looking for any coffee they can find as long as it doesn't say decaf on it as this indicates that it is poison.