This is an excitingly worded proposition but unfortunately it’s not a reflection of the reality. Everyone - even China - sees the value of a single root and a global architecture. Otherwise emails will stop working, the DNS system will get confused, and, more importantly, people are likely to isolate themselves from the network and so become increasingly out of touch as the network zooms off into the future.

What China is concerned about is control. So it still connects to the wider Net but has put in place extensive controls of the information available on that network.

Even supposing China did create an alternate network - what would persuade others to sign up to it? Even if that proposition then made sense to a number of countries, it’s almost impossible to see how the world would shift. And even if *that* happened, all you would end up with was an Internet with China in overall charge rather than the US.

The big geo-political issue over the Internet is sovereignty and control. There are two parts to this: one is the US government’s current oversight role; and the second is the culture of all the organisations that provide the expansion of the Internet.

The USG role is a problem for a lot of countries but the real threat to the Internet is in attempts to make the other organisations surrounding the Internet - most notably ICANN of course - less visible and more controllable by governments.

Once you have that then governments can devise ways in which to make the Internet itself a more controllable medium. And those controls - which will inevitably provide authoritarian governments with far greater powers to quell dissent - will come through a number of changes that are headlined as tackling terrorism or child pornography or whatever else is a suitable placard.

Kieren