In The World is Flat, Thomas Friedman asks whether our political systems have adjusted to the flattening of the world. If Facebook is a microcosm of our world, the answer is a resounding no.

Take Scrabble, for instance. On Facebook, Electronic Arts and GameHouse offer two versions of Scrabble: Scrabble and Scrabble Worldwide. Like the World Series, Scrabble Worldwide only includes part of the world. While the World Series only includes baseball teams inside the United States and Canada, Scrabble Worldwide only includes players from outside the United States and Canada. Of course, none of this makes any sense unless you delve in the the historical reasons for splitting up the markets.

So, to build this electronic Berlin Wall to segregate North America from the rest of the world, Electronic Arts attempts to locate players based on their IP address. However, sometimes, EA thinks that California is outside of the U.S., Canada and Puerto Rico. It’s a shame that EA has to waste time and money devising these anti-circumvention efforts (that don’t work well) to support some last century’s marketing decisions.