Internet fragmentation: An overview
January 2016
Policy Reports
Author: William J. Drake, Vinton G. Cerf, Wolfgang Kleinwächter
The paper outlines three possible forms of Internet fragmentation: technical fragmentation (infrastructure), governmental fragmentation (government policies constraining access to and use of the Internet) and commercial fragmentation (business actions that prevent access to and use of the Internet). Some of the identified ‘top 10’ cases of fragmentation are: failure to move to IPv6, blocking new gTLDs, filtering content, digital protectionism, prohibition on transborder data movement, and cybersovereignty.