… "But we should not despair. The way forward is to recover and nurture a different dimension to the much-feared Balkanization. So yes, there's a third way. Balkanization – a concept hijacked by technology firms on both sides of the Atlantic to push for their own business agendas – can also mean something very different and more upbeat: decentralization of information infrastructure combined with the erection of a few occasional barriers to what would otherwise be perfectly frictionless movement of data. Silicon Valley hates friction – in the 1990s Bill Gates sang gospels to “frictionless capitalism” and, more recently, Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg lauded “frictionless sharing” – but should we not inquire as to how much frictionlessness a democratic system can withhold?”