This story appears in the
July 2001 issue of
Entrepreneur.
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Are borderlines on the Internet unthinkable? A French court has
been studying the feasibility of requiring Yahoo! to block auctions
of Nazi items from French Web surfers' view. China is working
to implement a separate national Internet that some analysts fear
will both block international sites and prevent access by
outsiders. The compartmentalizing of the Internet could bode ill
for small businesses that, by virtue of the Web, have become global
enterprises.
John Patrick, vice president of Internet Technology at IBM and
chairman of the Global Internet
Project, isn't worried. "There probably are ideas in
various parts of the world to in some way fractionalize the
Internet. Technically it's possible to do something like that,
but in the long term I don't think efforts of that nature can
be successful. It's also technically possible to defeat those
kinds of efforts, and to the extent that there's value to
accessing the borderless Internet, people will find a way to get
connected to it."
The word to small businesses is, don't lose sleep over the
news stories. The borderless Internet, by virtue of its basis in
global standards and openness, is bound to defeat any major efforts
at regionalization or restricted access. "Regulating the
Internet is like regulating the wind," says Patrick.
"It's not going to happen."