The Ed of the Internet.docVIP

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The Ed of the Internet

BUSINESSJULY/AUGUST 2014 The End of the Internet? How regional networks may replace the World Wide Web GORDON M. GOLDSTEINJUN 25 2014, 9:06 PM ET Tweet 158 Matt Chase 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. In 2011, according to the World Economic Forum, growth in the digital economy created 6?million new jobs. The McKinsey Global Institute estimates that transborder online traffic grew 18-fold between 2005 and 2012 and that the global flow of goods, services, and investments—which reached $26 trillion in 2012—could more than triple by 2025. Facebook has launched a major initiative, in partnership with tech giants including Samsung and Qualcomm, dedicated to making the Internet available to the approximately two-thirds of the world’s population not yet connected. Cisco forecasts that between 2013 and 2022, the so-called Internet of Things will generate $14.4?trillion in value for global enterprises. 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. It might not remain that way for much longer. 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.” “I’m the most optimistic person I know on almost every topic,” the Internet entrepreneur Marc Andreessen recently said in a public interview, and “I’m incredibly concerned.” Andreessen said it is an “open question” whether the Internet five years from now “will still work the way that it does today.” If the long history of international commerce tells us anything, it is this: free trade is neither a natural nor an inev

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