Opinion: Balkanisation is bad for Facebook’s business

Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube don’t owe their profitability to superior technology, other than some techniques for managing large amounts of user data. They make money because they have a lot of eyeballs to which they can deliver advertisements. — Dreamstime/TNS

The Internet, once a freewheeling global network, is becoming balkanised into national spheres of influence. This could be bad for both cross-cultural communication and US tech companies.

China has long protected its local Internet, censoring speech behind what has become known as the Great Firewall. The government blocks US-based services such as Google, Facebook and Twitter, and closely monitors the local Chinese versions. Other authoritarian and quasi-authoritarian countries – Iran, Turkey, Pakistan, Vietnam, Ethiopia – do the same. And Russia recently passed a so-called sovereign Internet law that makes it much easier for the government to monitor and control online content.