IN 1997 FRANCES CAIRNCROSS, then of The Economist, memorably proclaimed “the death of distance”. Dame Frances (as she has since become) argued in a book with this title that telecommunications technology was making geography irrelevant to business and personal lives. Some of her claims may have been overblown but, in one crucial respect, the thesis was bang on. With the exception of China, around which the Communist Party erected the cyberspatial ramparts of the Great Firewall, distance was, in all markets that mattered, dead online.