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

[Attila Kinali <attila@example.com>]

On Thu, 2 Aug 2007 13:32:48 +0900
"Josh Glover" <jmglov@example.com> wrote:

> Thought-provoking, だよね。
> 
> I think the answer is: nothing.

That's what you think. The internet isn't as redundand as you'd imagine.
 
> We would see high latencies and plenty broken routes for at least a
> few hours, maybe lasting a few days (a few weeks would be doubtful) as
> the Internet routed around the US.

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

Ok, now to the damage. If we cut out the major exchange points in
NY, SF and LA, the US will be seperated from the rest of the world
for all practical means. Still working will be the connections
East Asia - Australia - South America, Europe - Afrika. IIRC there
is no direct connection between South America and Afrika or Europe.
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.
Result will be that East Asia/Australia/Pacific area will be cut
of from Europe/Afrika/West Asia.

> DNS would get crushed at first as
> many (most?) of the root servers are in the US, but they would quickly
> be replaced.

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.

> As for resources, well, between Google and the Wayback Machine, I
> think we could replace most of those, as well.

Google should have no problem. Their data centers are spread over
the whole world. Actually, most of those big internet services
shouldn't have much problem. The problem is rather with the
small services like archive.org which do not have the financial
backing to support a global infrastructure.

> So I think DARPA succeeded beyond their wildest dreams in building a
> communications network that could survive Nuclear Armageddon.

Not at all. DARPAnet was a lot more redundand than the internet
today. Most routes these days are manually or half-manually assigned.
Thus switching of routings requires manual intervention to override
the rules in the routers. Also there are only transcontinental backbones
along the major routes, like London/Amsterdam <-> New York (ie if you are
in Portugal, your IP pakets travel all the way north to London to cross
the Altlantic Ocean) and these are very vulnerable. 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)

The concentration of some internet services in the USA isn't as bad as it
used to be, but it could be a lot better. But at least the most important
stuff is well distributed.


				Attila Kinali
-- 
Praised are the Fountains of Shelieth, the silver harp of the waters,
But blest in my name forever this stream that stanched my thirst!
                         -- Deed of Morred