At a meeting last week in London that discussed the challenges facing the internet, the most provocative issue raised was the “Balkanization” of the internet. This article provides a link to a webcast and covers the main point raised by the meeting – the demographics of internet users are changing dramatically and in a few years Asian users should outnumber European and North American users, with an issue being IDNs being required for domain names. Nitin Desai raised the point that the Balkanization could occur if countries such as China felt left out of the internet.