The Google/China back-and-forth that has played across the media for the past few months has raised the specter of a fragmenting Internet, catchily known as the “splinternet.” The fear, raised in various forms, is that proprietary networks and devices, in addition to censorship and corporate withdrawal from certain nations, are fracturing the unified, standardized Internet that made it such a promising medium for international communication. To add to these fears, exacerbated by the withdrawal of Google from China, GoDaddy has just announced that it will no longer register domains in China due to onerous regulations. This has many arguing that China’s Internet will be a separate entity from the rest of the world.

But was the Internet ever all that unified? Or was it merely a potential, a hope?

The potential to speak, or even the potential to link, does not mean that potential is met. This may seem like an obvious point, but it is often missed in the rhetoric surrounding the transformational effect of the Internet.

The barriers to a unified Internet are far more numerable – and long-standing – than proprietary code or government censorship (though these certainly do have an impact). For one, language is a significant barrier to communicating on an international medium. More fundamentally (and less cured by technological advancement), most people lack either the time or interest to meet the potential of a unified Internet. Even more, as UCT Professor Marion Walton notes, the billions of people excluded from the Internet due to poverty have never been connected to even the hope of a unified Internet.

It is important to be aware and attempt to counteract new divisions between the communicative capacity of humans – among which are censorship and technical incompatibility – but valuing interconnectedness requires a far broader view than most pundits have right now.