Balkanization

I've just printed a recent paper, from CoNEXT 2007. The abstract finishes with the following sentence:

In addition, at the Nash equilibrium point, the routing and connecting/peering strategies maximize aggregate network profits, encourage ISP connectivity so as to limit balkanization.

The term repeats 5 times on the front page of the article and the first thing I did was googling to find out if this is a real word. Since it has a wikipedia page, I guess it is official.

Now I am going back to read the paper...