Broken Web The Coming Collapse of the Internet

What if the internet stopped working for a day?

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E very state in the world has its own laws, cultural norms and accepted behaviours. As billions of people come online in the next decade, many will discover a newfound independence that will test these boundaries.

How one clumsy ship cut off the web for 75 million people

Each state will attempt to regulate the internet, and shape it in its own image. The majority of the world's internet users encounter some form of censorship — also known by the euphemism "filtering" — but what that actually looks like depends on a country's policies and its technological infrastructure.

Not all or even most of that filtering is political censorship; progressive countries routinely block a modest number of sites, such as those featuring child pornography. In some countries, there are several entry points for internet connectivity, and a handful of private telecommunications companies control them with some regulation. In others, there is only one entry point, a nationalised internet service provider ISP , through which all traffic flows. Filtering is relatively easy in the latter case, and more difficult in the former.

When technologists began to notice states regulating and projecting influence online, some warned against a "Balkanisation of the internet", whereby national filtering and other restrictions would transform what was once the global internet into a connected series of nation-state networks. The web would fracture and fragment, and soon there would be a "Russian internet" and an "American internet" and so on, all coexisting and sometimes overlapping but, in important ways, separate.

Information would largely flow within countries but not across them, due to filtering, language or even just user preference. The process would at first be barely perceptible to users, but it would fossilise over time and ultimately remake the internet.

It's very likely that some version of the above scenario will occur, but the degree to which it does will greatly be determined by what happens in the next decade with newly connected states — which path they choose, whom they emulate and work together with. The first stage of the process, aggressive and distinctive filtering, is under way. China is the world's most active and enthusiastic filterer of information. Entire platforms that are hugely popular elsewhere in the world — Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter — are blocked by the Chinese government.

On the Chinese internet, you would be unable to find information about politically sensitive topics such as the Tiananmen Square protests, embarrassing information about the Chinese political leadership, the Tibetan rights movement and the Dalai Lama, or content related to human rights, political reform or sovereignty issues. To the average Chinese user, this censorship is seamless — without prior knowledge of events or ideas, it would appear that they never existed. China's leadership doesn't hesitate to defend its policies.

In a white paper released in , the government calls the internet "a crystallisation of human wisdom" but states that China's "laws and regulations clearly prohibit the spread of information that contains contents subverting state power, undermining national unity [or] infringing upon national honour and interests. The next stage for many states will be collective editing, states forming communities of interest to edit the web together, based on shared values or geopolitics. For larger states, collaborations will legitimise their filtering efforts and deflect some unwanted attention the "look, others are doing it too" excuse.

For smaller states, alliances along these lines will be a low-cost way to curry favour with bigger players and gain technical skills that they might lack at home. Larger states are less likely to band together than smaller ones — they already have the technical capabilities — so it will be a fleet of smaller states, pooling their resources, that will find this method useful. If some member countries in the Commonwealth of Independent States CIS , an association of former Soviet states, became fed up with Moscow's insistence on standardising the Russian language across the region, they could join together to censor all Russian-language content from their national internets and thus limit their citizens' exposure to Russia.

Ideology and religious morals are likely to be the strongest drivers of these collaborations. Imagine if a group of deeply conservative Sunni-majority countries — say, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Algeria and Mauritania — formed an online alliance and decided to build a "Sunni web".

In some cases, shutting down the internet for a short time might even increase productivity. In another study, Borg and his colleagues analysed what happened when a company suffered an internet outage that lasted four hours or more. Rather than twiddle their thumbs, employees did things that they would normally put off, such as dealing with paperwork. The result was a boost for business. Travel probably would not be affected too much in the short term, either — so long as the blackout lasted no more than a day or so.

Planes can fly without the internet, and trains and buses would continue to run. Longer outages would start to have an effect on logistics, however. Without the internet it would be hard for businesses to operate. A large communication breakdown would probably disproportionately affect small businesses and blue-collar workers.

Upper-middle-class individuals with managerial or professional jobs did not perceive the event as largely problematic. But many blue-collar freelancers such as plumbers and carpenters relied solely on their pagers for getting jobs and found themselves out of work for a few days. Single mothers who left their children at daycare also reported significant distress at not being able to be paged if a problem occurred. Psychological effects, like feelings of isolation and anxiety, would hit people across the board, however.

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We are used to being able to connect to anyone, anywhere and at any time. What if my car breaks down, could I talk anyone into letting me use their phone to call for help? Most people using the internet are actually more social than those who are not using the internet — William Dutton. In , a fire at the New York Telephone Company cut off the phone service in a block area of Manhattan for 23 days. In a survey of people carried out immediately after lines were restored, researchers found that four-fifths of respondents said they missed the phone , especially its ability to connect them with friends and family.

Stine Lomborg at the University of Copenhagen agrees. The loss of connection may make people more social in specific situations, such as forcing co-workers to speak to each other rather than sending emails, but overall the experience is likely to be distressing. The feeling would be fleeting, however.

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Take any of the top ten viruses and add a bit of poison to them, and most of the world wakes up on a Tuesday morning unable to surf the Net — or finding much less there if it can. The protocols efficiently break digital data into simple units called packets and send the packets to their destinations through a series of network routers. Both the routers and PCs, also called nodes, have unique digital addresses known as Internet Protocol or IP addresses.

The system assumed that all users on the network could be trusted and that the computers linked by the Internet were mostly fixed objects.

Nor did it accommodate nodes that moved — such as PDAs that could connect to the Internet at any of myriad locations. Over the years, a slew of patches arose: One patch assigns each mobile node a new IP address every time it moves to a new point in the network. And the most common mobility patch — the IP addresses that constantly change as you move around — has downsides. The constantly changing address also means you can expect breaks in service if you are using the Internet to, say, listen to a streaming radio broadcast on your PDA. It also means that someone who commits a crime online using a mobile device will be harder to track down.

In the view of many experts in the field, there are even more fundamental reasons to be concerned. Patches create an ever more complicated system, one that becomes harder to manage, understand, and improve upon. That approach is one that has worked for 30 years. But there is reason to be concerned.

How one clumsy ship cut off the web for 75 million people | Technology | The Guardian

Without a long-term plan, if you are just patching the next problem you see, you end up with an increasingly complex and brittle system. It makes new services difficult to employ.

It makes it much harder to manage because of the added complexity of all these point solutions that have been added. At the same time, there is concern that we will hit a dead end at some point. But while his company makes its money from patching the Net, Leighton says the whole system needs fundamental architectural change. Take Microsoft, for example. Its software mediates between the Internet and the PC. Today, we train everybody for security.

Of course, some would argue that Microsoft is now scrambling to make up for years of selling insecure products. But the Microsoft example has parallels elsewhere. The existing Internet architecture also stands in the way of new technologies. Networks of intelligent sensors that collectively monitor and interpret things like factory conditions, the weather, or video images could change computing as much as cheap PCs did 20 years ago. But they have entirely different communication requirements. All of this is happening in an embedded context.

Architectural Digest When Clark talks about creating a new architecture, he says the job must start with the setting of goals. First, give the medium a basic security architecture — the ability to authenticate whom you are communicating with and prevent things like spam and viruses from ever reaching your PC. Second, make the new architecture practical by devising protocols that allow Internet service providers to better route traffic and collaborate to offer advanced services without compromising their businesses.

Third, allow future computing devices of any size to connect to the Internet — not just PCs but sensors and embedded processors. Fourth, add technology that makes the network easier to manage and more resilient. For example, a new design should allow all pieces of the network to detect and report emerging problems — whether technical breakdowns, traffic jams, or replicating worms — to network administrators. The good news is that some of these goals are not so far off.

Academic and corporate research labs have generated a number of promising technologies: The software looks for telltale packets sent out by worm-infected machines searching for new hosts and can warn system administrators of infections. Other software prototypes detect the emergence of data traffic jams and come up with more efficient ways to reroute traffic around them.

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