Splinternet

Wise words from one of advertising's elder statesmen, who has seen the industry evolve from TV, radio, and print to today's splinternet.

Increasingly, writers refer to internets or splinternets as ways to describe an increasingly fragmented web in which power brokers create limited access to the Web and the curricular informality of connectivity is challenged by formality.

The splinternet fear is often presented as a binary choice between one global Facebook or Google, or 200 versions. But there are ideas floating around to set a global baseline of online expression, and a process for adjudicating disputes.

The demise of “de minimis”, as the exemption is known, is the latest, symbolic reminder to digital darlings that frontiers exist—and that business models built on their absence are in need of a rethink.