インターネットの「バルカン化」

今全部読むひまがないのだけれど、いろんな意味で興味深い記事。

「フラット化する世界」だと思っていたら、どうもそれに逆行して、ナショナリズムと各国の閉鎖化が問題になりだしている。その一つの現象として、例えば「開かれたフラットな世界」の象徴たるインターネットですら、「バルカン半島化」しつつある、とウォールストリート・ジャーナルが書いている。

Rise of Nationalism Frays Global Ties - WSJ
（有料メンバーでないと全部は読めないかも・・・）

Rise of Nationalism Frays Global Ties
Trade, Environment Face New Threats; Balkanized Internet

National boundaries are going up even on the Internet, the emblem of the borderless world. The Internet was designed to be beyond the reach of governments, shifting power to individuals or private organizations.

Now, pressured by Russia, China, India and Saudi Arabia, the U.S. company that assigns Internet addresses is working on ways for countries to use characters from their home languages. The familiar .org, .com and country codes in Web addresses will be replaced with their equivalents in Chinese, Hindi and many other languages. While that should help locals navigate the Web, it would also put many sites behind curtains to users from abroad. That would spell the end of the days when anyone with a keyboard that produces Latin letters can see sites in any land -- essentially taking the "world wide" out of the World Wide Web.

"We're facing a step-by-step Balkanization of the global Internet," says Columbia University law professor Tim Wu. "It's becoming a series of national networks."