When networks fail cumulatively for weeks, can geographic systems survive?
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-50273-5
When networks fail cumulatively for weeks, can geographic systems survive?
This is something that can be tested in real world networks for countries, regions, cities, corporate networks, non-profit networks and support networks of all types. The Internet is so “hand-made, hand-maintained, hand-audited and verified” now, I can imagine whole countries, cities, critical systems failing because of too brittle systems.
They do not have to fail forever. A city that cannot recover before people run out of food and supplies. Vulnerable people die. Vulnerable companies, groups and regions die.
It is amenable to analysis, even using the one-shot chat systems to help – if they are required to log everything and report openly. But it has to be done openly, verified, honest, testable, globally, fairly.
I know that government and corporate Internet-connected systems are fragile, they break when anything out of the ordinary occurs and and fall back to “some human will figure it out”, even when that has not been tested or even examined conscientiously, carefully and completely. But the humans in systems now are more and more isolated. No tools to see what is happening at corporate scale, let alone national or larger.
What if rich network corporations and geographic governments were at war with each other? The companies would win because they could cripple the geographic governments. Are there policies and collaborative approaches that work at global scale, for all countries, and regions, and for groups working topics and issues – systemically and soon heliospherically?
Richard Collins, The Internet Foundation
