Coye and Ashwin wrote convincingly of a fragile Internet held together by trust, relationships, and inertia. The piece (“The New Cartographers: Trust and Social Order within the Internet Infrastructure”) had me wondering just how far we are from a major routing breakdown. If we look at the example of Pakistan's botched blocking of YouTube, the greatest enemy of an orderly Internet may be sheer incompetence. Still, what is the doomsday scenario and how hard would it be for activists of any stripe to hold the Internet hostage?

Hacking complex communications infrastructure to suit your needs is not only possible, but it is literally happening today. Consider for example the case of Libyan rebels hijacking the national mobile telecommunications infrastructure in eastern parts of the country: A team led by a Libyan-American telecom executive has helped rebels hijack Col. Moammar Gadhafi's cellphone network and re-establish their own communications. The new network, first plotted on an airplane napkin and assembled with the help of oil-rich Arab nations, is giving more than two million Libyans their first connections to each other and the outside world after Col. Gadhafi cut off their telephone and Internet service about a month ago. (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870384190457625651299121528...)

Libya actually provides more than one convenient exmaple of the interconnectedness of the telecommunications infrastructure in the modern age. Shortly after conflict broke out in Libya in February, the Libyan government cut itself off from the Internet. Silicon Valley consumer internet pundits were all atwitter about the fact that Bit.ly, a leading URL shortener, coudl be in big trouble. Bit.ly CEO John Borthwick quickly jumped onto Quora (of course) to reassure the public that everything would be OK for Bit.ly (if not for the rebels): "Should Libya block Internet traffic, as Egypt did, it will not affect http://bit.ly or any .ly domain.” Not everyone was convinced, however: 

Of course, if Libya were to keep its Internet turned off for more than a few days, then the  “ly” addresses will  run into trouble. As Internet engineer Kim Davies explained on Quora, “It is a sense of false confidence to state that country-code domains are impervious to these kinds of government-mandated Internet shutdowns. If a country like Libya decides to shut down the Internet affecting the registry operations of .LY, while it is unlikely to have an immediate effect unless they explicitly empty the registry data, it can have a devastating effect in short order.” (http://www.middleeastwarpeace.info/2011/02/20/libya-turns-off-the-internet-and-the-massacres-begin/)

Returning to the idea of intentional disruption via routing mischief, I can't help but wonder what major Internet players are doing to protect themselves from the kind of routing nightmare caused by the Pakistani government. Consider Amazon.com. According to speculation following an outage in 2008, any outage is costly. "Based on last quarter's revenue of $4.13 billion globally, a full-scale global outage would cost Amazon more than $31,000 per minute on average. For North America, it would be more than $16,000 per minute." (http://news.cnet.com/8301-10784_3-9962010-7.html).

Is Amazon taking precautions to prevent this kind of outage? Is there anything they can actually do? Coye and Ashwin talk about community, trust, and family when referring to network administrators. But what if one went rogue? Or are we all (including rogue actors now) too interdependent at this stage to risk collateral damage to our own interests?