One of the big implications of the Internet has always been the promise of worldwide governance.

It's something that has been accelerated by the so-called "War on Terror." The enemy here isn't a nation-state, or a collection of nation-states. The enemy lies in non-state actors, criminal gangs, Bond Villians. Thanks in part to the Internet, small conspiracies and causes have the power to do enormous damage. Causes that could once be called regional, or ignored altogether, can now bite hard at the center of civilization itself, threatening its very existance.

Nowhere is this more true than on the Internet itself. If you're in the U.S., or Japan, or even France, you may be wondering what I'm talking about. But if you're in Macedonia, or in dozens of other two-letter domains with weak Internet governance, you know exactly what I'm talking about. (That's the Macedonian flag, at left, from the WorldAtlas.)

Blacklists.

There are three ways in which huge blocks of IP numbers and entire countries are being blacklisted from the Internet today:

• Countries without modern banking systems are being excluded from e-commerce. Try to buy a book from Romania.
  
• Countries where massive frauds occur because of weak Internet regulations are being denied access to major sites.
  
• Countries where spammers have taken over domains or ISPs are being denied access to e-mail. This is especially true for outbound e-mail.
  

Right now private groups are essentially determining who has access to Internet services and who doesn't. Visa and MasterCard are halting e-commerce to many countries, telling merchants not to ship due to heavy chargebacks. Hosting ISPs are putting blocks on site access, fearing incoming spam. Many are also, without notice or any real process, simply refusing to deliver mail from countries that haven't policed open relays.

Ironically most fraud and spam comes from the U.S., not from these developing countries. It's our criminals who are using these other nations' networks as transit points, or relays, for our crimes, which is causing those nations' people to be blacklisted from full participation in the Internet world. It's just that there is so much legitimate traffic in the U.S. that we can't apply blacklists to Americans -- the sea is so big that the sharks become just a natural part of the habitat. In other countries, foreign and domestic criminals are simply driving entire nations offline.

This is something the rookies at the ITU are going to learn soon enough. And when they do, their reaction will not sound pretty to American ears, I guarantee.