Could the Internet Ever Be Destroyed?

The coming threats to the global Internet could take many forms

The raging battle over SOPA and PIPA, the proposed anti-piracy laws, is looking more and more likely to end in favor of Internet freedom — but it won’t be the last battle of its kind. Although, ethereal as it is, the Internet seems destined to survive in some form or another, experts warn that there are many threats to its status quo existence, and there is much about it that could be ruined or lost.

Physical destruction

A vast behemoth that can route around outages and self-heal, the Internet has grown physically invulnerable to destruction by bombs, fires or natural disasters — within countries, at least. It’s “very richly interconnected,” said David Clark, a computer scientist at MIT who was a leader in the development of the Internet during the 1970s. “You would have to work real hard to find a small number of places where you could seriously disrupt connectivity.” On 9/11, for example, the destruction of the major switching center in south Manhattan disrupted service locally. But service was restored about 15 minutes later when the center “healed” as the built-in protocols routed users and information around the outage.

However, while it’s essentially impossible to cripple connectivity internally in a country, Clark said it is conceivable that one country could block another’s access to its share of the Internet cloud; this could be done by severing the actual cables that carry Internet data between the two countries. Thousands of miles of undersea fiber-optic cables that convey data from continent to continent rise out of the ocean in only a few dozen locations, branching out from those hubs to connect to millions of computers. But if someone were to blow up one of these hubs — the station in Miami, for example, which handles some 90 percent of the Internet traffic between North America and Latin America — the Internet connection between the two would be severely hampered until the infrastructure was repaired.

Such a move would be “an act of cyberwar,” Clark told Life’s Little Mysteries, a sister site to LiveScience.

Content cache

Even an extreme disruption of international connectivity would not seriously threaten the survival of Web content itself. A “hard” copy of most data is stored in nonvolatile memory, which sticks around with or without power, and whether you have Internet access to it or not. Furthermore, according to William Lehr, an MIT economist who studies the economics and regulatory policy of the Internet-infrastructure industries, the corporate data centers that harbor Web content — everything from your emails to this article — have sophisticated ways to back up and diversely store the data, including simply storing copies in multiple locations.

Google even stores cached copies of all Wikipedia pages; these were accessible on Jan. 18 when Wikipedia took its own versions of the pages offline in protest of SOPA and PIPA.

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This diversified storage plan keeps the content itself safe, but it also offers some protection against loss of access to any one copy of the data in the event of a cyberwar. For example, if power were cut to a server, you may be unable to reach a website on its home server, but you mayfind a cached version of the content stored on another, accessible server. Or, “If you wanted data that was not available from a server in country X, you may be able to get substantively the same data from a server in country Y,” Lehr said.

Internet arms race

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