Internet Fragmentation: An Overview

from the executive summary:
A growing number of thought leaders have expressed concerns over the 
past two years that the Internet is in some danger of splintering or 
breaking up into loosely coupled islands of connectivity. A number of 
potentially troubling trends driven by technological developments, 
government policies and commercial practices have been rippling across 
the Internet’s layers, from the underlying infrastructures up to the 
applications, content and transactions it conveys. But there does not 
appear to be a clearly defined, widely shared understanding of what the 
term, fragmentation, does and does not entail.

The growth of these concerns does not indicate a pending cataclysm. The 
Internet remains stable and generally open and secure in its 
foundations, and it is morphing and incorporating new capabilities that 
open up extraordinary new horizons, from the Internet of Things and 
services to the spread of block chain technology and beyond. Moreover, 
the increasing synergies between the Internet and revolutionary changes 
in other technological and social arenas are leading us into a new era 
of global development that can be seen as constituting a fourth 
industrial revolution. But there are challenges accumulating which, if 
left unattended, could chip away to varying degrees at the Internet’s 
enormous capacity to facilitate human progress. We need to take stock of 
these, and to begin a more structured dialogue about their nature, scope 
and distributed collective management.

full paper:
http://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_FII_Internet_Fragmentation_An_Overview_2016.pdf

—n.

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