Pankaj Ghemawat says the world is not flat (“Why the World Isn’t Flat,” March/April 2007). No kidding. In arguing that globalization and economic integration are still far from a reality, Ghemawat fails to take into account the bigger picture of what is actually taking place in the business world. His narrow focus on the “10 percent” of internationalization across certain industries obscures my basic argument about the future of globalization. Obviously, the world is not yet flat. But my larger point is that the “flattening” technologies and processes of globalization now under way are the most important developments not just in economics but also in government, politics, war, finance, journalism, innovation, and society in general. Flattening technologies are empowering individuals, in previously unheard of ways, to reach farther, faster, deeper, and cheaper than ever before. Big institutions, from newspapers and television networks to software firms and Texas power companies, are being fundamentally transformed or challenged by these super-empowered individuals. Two tiny environmental groups just held up the biggest leveraged buyout in history—the deal for TXU, the Texas electrical utility—until it was reshaped to their liking. Tell them the world is not flat.

You need only look at the front pages of the paper every day to see it. And anyone who thinks that some protectionist measures are going to put YouTube back in the bottle—not to mention the Web, bloggers, global cell-phone networks, work-flow software, and the logic of outsourcing—is blind to the dramatic changes that have already taken hold. This is not about a snapshot, a “10 percent presumption” of integration at a moment in time. This is about trend lines and a scale of change brought on by these new technologies....