The new book “Netto no Takai Kabe (High Walls on the Internet)” has been published from NTT Publishing. Chief Fellow Izumi Harada edited the book and also wrote the Introduction, and Senior Research Fellow Koji Suda wrote Chapter 4.

It has been said that the Internet has no borders and would create a flattened world. As the Internet spread over the world, however, and its influential power has expanded and increased in social importance, a variety of “new walls” are emerging around the Internet world. The “national borders” appearing on the Internet that reflect the real relationships between countries, and the new walls being erected across the existing national borders as well as within those borders as the result of the grouping by ethnicity, religion, language, economy and ideology have started to affect real social relationships. The recent row over the Internet censorship on Google in China indeed highlighted the existence of such a “wall” between the US and China.

This book reports on the “new walls” appearing in Japan and China as well as US and the Islamic sphere, and provides penetrating insights into the landscape of the Internet world today.