Worse will come if, say, the Chinese government decides to set up its own root directory of Chinese domain names, held on its own computers and independent of the existing US-based directory. This could give the Chinese authorities control over which sites its citizens access, potentially giving it the power to largely isolate them from the rest of the net. "The language changes will accelerate national fragmentation of the internet," warns Tim Wu, professor of technology and law at Columbia University in New York. He predicts this will lead us down a road towards a divided internet: one part controlled by the US, one by China, and another by Russia.