The Internet could crash. We need a plan B

Day 7 / 365

Anyone who has ever built a website in recent times would know how tough it is to find a good available domain name. When Danny Hillis set out to register a domain name for his company back in 1985, there were only 2 domains already existing. For a second he thought may be he should reserve some other good domain names as well, just in case. But he decided against it, as he thought that wouldn’t be fair to others.

That was how people who first adopted the internet used to think. They trusted each other as a community, and knew they could depend on each other to get their job done. The building blocks that internet was built upon was based on trust, and that holds true today as well. But the people today have changed, and that is a cause of concern.

How Pakistan blocked YouTube for a third of the world

In 2008, Pakistan’s government ordered it’s ISPs (Internet Service Providers) to block YouTube inside the country. The ISPs complied by rerouting all requests to YouTube to a “black hole” — a page saying YouTube is blocked. So far so good. The problem began when one of the ISPs Pakistan Telecom accidentally broadcasted the new route to Hong Kong’s PCCW. PCCW is much bigger, and it continued broadcasting the incorrect route all over the world, and soon all the requests to YouTube from around the world were being sent to Pakistan Telecom.

This was not the first time an error like this has happened. A Turkish telecom provider in 2004 started advertising that it was the best route to all of the Internet, causing widespread outages for many websites over several hours.

The vulnerability of the Internet and looking for a plan B

In the Ted Talk Danny used the above example to say that if the Internet in its correct form is so vulnerable to mistakes, Imagine how vulnerable it would be to a deliberate attack.

The internet is getting more and more complex. Like the financial system, it’s something for which we understand the parts that make it, but we can’t grasp the bigger picture. And like the financial system, its prone to collapse sooner or later.

This is why, Danny suggested, we need an alternate for the Internet, a plan B. It doesn’t have to be as powerful or as performant as the Internet. But it needs to have completely different set of building blocks. So that in the worst case scenario, if the Internet fails us, Our lives can still function.

This story is part of my 365 Day Project for 2019. Read about it here

Up next — A Kinder, Gentler Philosophy to Success