Web Crash 2007

Were you wondering why your office internet connection was so slow this morning?

ONN has the Breaking News on it.



Breaking News: All Online Data Lost After Internet Crash

After wiping off the tears of laughter from my face, I came to think of redundancy in the internet's topology.

Even though most of us consider internet routing paths to be laid out greatly redundant, the truth requires a little more thought, as for instance becomes apparent by some comments on Bruce Schneier's blog.

The whole concept of the internet is not compatible with the notion of being breakable. It is parts of the network of networks that carry the risk of being weakly linked to the rest of the world.

The internet protocol (IP) does not require packets to follow predetermined paths, thus allowing for data to be routed flexibly and with a high probability of arrival at its intended destination.

Just too bad when an ISP does not provide enough redundant connections out of its own network. All the routing flexibility of IP does not help, if there is only one path to the outside world, constituting a single point of failure.

Redundancy costs money, without necessarily providing any imminent and easily perceivable benefit to customers.

The lack of redundancy marketability and network outages being potentially cheaper to ISPs than continuous investments into redundancy measures, makes such efforts even less attractive.

For ISPs having to cater to the free market, costs and prices are much more powerful figures.

With the internet becoming more and more important for almost everybody's personal and business lives, wouldn't this be an area where government regulation, such as requiring a minimum number of connections to different Tier 1 ISPs and/or IXPs, would make sense?