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

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

On 05/08/07, Stephen J. Turnbull <stephen@example.com> wrote:

> That's up to him, though.  In particular, some people's brains shut
> down when they find out you're an expert.  Some of those people will
> accept whatever you say uncritically, others will oppose it equally
> uncritically, just because you're an expert.

OK, I accept this. I disagree, but I suppose it is up to the poster.

>  > 2. New pipes can be laid extremely quickly when necessary.
>
> But not across oceans AFAIK, even today.

In an emergency situation, I think it would not be unreasonable to
assume that someone could lay a trans-South-Atlantic or -Pacific cable
in a matter of weeks. I may be wrong; I am no Cable & Wireless
consultant. ;)

Also, satellites are not used so heavily in today's Internet due to
latency, but in an emergency, I think a bunch of satellite links would
spring into existence.

> This implies (AFAICS) a hierarchical network, and thus
> chokepoints where throttling will be effective.  So Josh's argument
> has a chance to be effective:
>
>  > I agree with all of this. But why do you assume that the ISPs are
>  > sitting on their hands? No halfway decent network admin will rely on
>  > the clients' TCP stacks playing nice; they'll start changing routing
>  > policies and choking way back on the throttles so their queues don't
>  > overflow.

And remember, I do not claim to know much about the implementation of
the Internet, but a theoretical model (and I have actually implemented
large-scale simulations networks--using BGP routing--where various
nodes could be shut off, to see how a completely autonomous
Internet-style network would behave; the results were encouraging)
suggests that the Internet *could* survive such a massive catastrophe,
and all evidence of the Internet handling smaller-scale events seems
to point in the same direction.

You and I may just have to agree to differ.

I just do not think you or A Certain Other Party Who Will Remain
Nameless are correct to dismiss my ideas out of hand because you
perceive (and almost certainly correctly so) that you know more about
the current implementation of the Internet than I do. My argument is
certainly a largely academic one, but like I said, it has not been
disproved by evidence to the contrary as of yet.

-- 
Cheers,
Josh