I was giving more thought to a recent item, based on Joi Ito's brilliant piece on The Internets, and it occurred to me that the fight for "One Internet" has, in many ways, already been lost.

(The term Balkanize, or Balkanization, is often used in English to refer to this splitting up, which often (as in the 1990s) is accompanied by enormous violence. This picture of the Balkans as they are today is from Theodora.com.)

Think about it. How often do you use a Web site outside your own country? If you're an American, the answer is not very often. This is true for most people.

A lot more follows.

One reason is language. We want sites written in our own language. But for most of us, our concerns in life don't cross the border either. If you're an American, how often do you visit a site in Australia, or New Zealand, or England?

Now, imagine you're Chinese, or Japanese, or Korean, or you speak Farsi, Arabic, maybe Gujarati. You could use Google to translate a site for you, but that's kludgy, time-consuming, and why are you going there?

Consider that URLs don't have to be written in English. There are Chinese-character domains. Think you will ever visit one? Think you would be able to find one? JPNIC has been handing out Kanji-character domain names since 2000. These are the fastest-growing portions of the Web, with the most active, fastest-growing broadband populations. You couldn't Google 'em if you wanted to (not that you want to).

Here's yet another problem, IPv6. The U.S. was given the largest number of IPv4 addresses, so Asia is moving rapidly toward IPv6. These addresses have 16 digits, and those digits don't have to be numbers. Any ASCII character will do. CORRECTION: These addresses have 32 digits, which can be any hexadecimal number. Even if you could translate those Chinese URLs, in other words, you might have trouble getting their IP numbers.

Add cost to the problems of language. Many connections to Africa take place over satellite links. American and European sites are frequently cached there, by local ISPs, to reduce cost. How often are the caches updated? Not as often as the sites are.

Want another problem with keeping the Internet connected? Spam. Most spam comes from the U.S. Spam, spim, comment spam, RSS spam, malware -- these are our major Internet exports, folks. These activities are immense bandwidth hogs. Not a problem when you're filling fiber cables criss-crossing Kansas. What about the single fiber cable coming toward Nairobi (I'm guessing the balance-of-spam between us and the 419s tilts heavily in our favor), or if you're trying to maintain a connection between, say, Bahia Blanca, Argentina and San Antonio, Texas. In other words, costs that are trivial in the U.S. are meaningful elsewhere, another reason to keep your surfing close to home.

Let's review, shall we? Factors that are already balkanizing the Internet include:

1. Huma nature.
   
2. Language.
   
3. Foreign-character URLs.
   
4. IPv6
   
5. Link costs.
   
6. Spam.
   

Please feel free to add your own reasons to this list in the comments.

Now, before you write, consider again the growing gap between the U.S. and UN, our ultra-nationalism meeting their growing anti-Americanism, and you have a recipe for worldwide internetworkign disaster.

A disaster that has already begun.