The Internet Splits Up; The Web changed the world. Politics is now changing it back.

Newsweek International, May, 2006 by Foroohar, Rana; Schafer, Sarah; Villeminot, Florence

Byline: Rana Foroohar (With Florence Villeminot in Paris and Sarah Schafer in Beijing)

Sometimes it's tough to remember what life was like before the Internet. In those long-ago-seeming days, phone calls were expensive, document-shipping frequent, and we actually had to troll for random information in (gasp!) books. The Web made everything better. Suddenly, we could connect as often as we liked, for as long as we liked, with anyone and everything. Data became a commodity. Life was good. That was Internet 1.0. But consider Internet 2.0, currently in development. No longer an egalitarian utopia, it has become much like the rest of society--divided by class and geography. And its growing fragmentation threatens the smooth operation of the global economy.

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