Re: [tlug] What would happen to the Internet if the US fell off the map

["Josh Glover" <jmglov@example.com>]

On 02/08/07, Attila Kinali <attila@example.com> wrote:

> On Thu, 2 Aug 2007 13:32:48 +0900 "Josh Glover" <jmglov@example.com> wrote:
>
> > I think the answer is: nothing.
>
> That's what you think. The internet isn't as redundand as you'd imagine.

Yes, that is what I think, and unless you give me evidence to the
contrary, I think my knowledge of Internet redundancy is at least
equivalent to your own.

Please ask Steve Turnbull how fast the Internet can rebuild itself.
His experience is local, but the protocols scale.

Please read the aforementioned Corey Doctorow story, and see if you
agree with his assessment; I certainly think it sounds reasonable.

> First, let us evaluate what the USA provides in terms of communication.
> Network wise, it's the connection between east asia, australia, europe
> and the rest of americas.

But there are other pipes, which would be swamped at first, then come
back up as their owners route around them. Underwater long-haul pipes
would be spliced (at great cost, but who cares? the Internet is now
*vital* to most business and government functions around the world).

> Services provided currently are DNS registration for the
> non-national tlds. Widely used search services like google, yahoo&co.
> Various news sites etc.

Again, all of this would survive or be replaced. I am sure that
InterNIC has contingency plans that do not involve the US.

As you note later, Google would be fine (they have a truly massive
data centre in Dublin, almost within spitting distance of Amazon's).
Yahoo would be fine; they are global. Even Slashdot is mirrored. :)

> And even if there would be, it would be only very small connections,
> a few Gbit/s at most, as it has only to accomodate the small traffic
> into these internet wise rather underdeveloped countries and those
> would become unfunctionall as soon as the routes would switch.

Yes, but control would return. Small pipes can be rate-limited, and
the rate limits would bubble back up the pipes to local ISPs. The Net
would slow to a 28.8 modem-like crawl for a little while, but it would
be back.

> Result will be that East Asia/Australia/Pacific area will be cut
> of from Europe/Afrika/West Asia.

Nah, I don't buy this; see above.

> DNS should be pretty much fine, as the root dns servers are
> well spread over the world and even the non-country tlds are
> not as USA centric as they used to be.

Good. I am glad to hear this has been fixed.

> The problem is rather with the
> small services like archive.org which do not have the financial
> backing to support a global infrastructure.

But you forget about mirroring. :)

> Not at all. DARPAnet was a lot more redundand than the internet
> today.

No. You are flat wrong.

> Most routes these days are manually or half-manually assigned.

Right, and thus they can be manually re-assigned (though I would not
agree with your use of the word "most").

> Thank god for the
> oversizing made during the .com buble, otherwise we'd have daily problems
> with flooded backbones. (side note: there are hardly any satelite
> connections used these days, as their delay is too high)

Again, the Internet has become to important to too many people to run
into serious scaling problems. If you build it, they will come...

I still think the Internet would be fine without the US. Not right
away, of course, but the Internet can recover quite nicely from all
manner of catastrophes.

-- 
Cheers,
Josh