I doubt governments would produce a more robust network, or even a network as robust. I know the UK government failed pitifully to build such a network for its own military several times, that covered areas under one military, and legal jurisdiction.

It is also naive to assume that government isn’t involved in some of the big Internet connectivity decisions. If Taiwan thinks it needs better connectivity for reasons of national security, it can readily arrange it, that it hasn’t suggests the government didn’t consider it a priority.

The robustness issue is governed by cost. More robust networks cost more. The great things about the Internet is that one can make ones own connectivity more robust by spending money, when it is appropriate. This underlies the concept of scalability, anyone who perceives a need for more robustness can do it without a change of global governance (assuming the big networks carry on talking, which is an issue, but that issue would arise if it were governments instead of companies, at least usually with companies you can wave some money to resolve an issue if it hurts enough, try doing that with say the US and North Korea relationship).

Managing dependencies on remote resources is distinct from network robustness, and wouldn’t go away even if one made the network magically perfect.

The first I heard of the loss of fibre were reports of a significant drop in spam. None of my companies systems, or my personal systems, depended on poorly connected areas in the far east.

I did see an issue when Katrina struck. One of the UK government websites I visited used a search service provided by someone who bought their DNS services from a well known DNS vendor who had located all their DNS servers in New Orleans. This was a dependency a properly informed purchaser could have seen before they purchased the DNS services (and also before the search system was bought from that vendor). Then again perhaps the website thought that their search service purchase didn’t require that level of diligence because it is a commodity service easily replaced.

I think the US monopoly on the root DNS is an issue worth discussion, but again I’m not sure how moving it to the UN would make it work better.

By and large the control is illusionary. There are competing root operators, and it is only by agreement that people use the IANA root servers. If tomorrow the US decided to take the top level domain of a major country away, I expect a large number of big ISPs would switch root servers within hours. Indeed serious folk in the DNS root server business are involved in running parallel infrastructure which could easily take over if the US government attempted to abuse its position.

That no major ISPs (AFAIK) jumped ship over the XXX issue, suggests that they don’t perceive it as significant enough to sacrifice the consistency of an IANA root.

One of the more persistent founding myths around the internet is that it was designed to be able to withstand a nuclear war, [...] It isn’t true, of course.

The internet is a sandwich of different layers. The basic protocol level (IP) and the protocols of the management level (BGP et. al) were designed to work even if large part of the network were to be disconnected due to failures at the physical level.

If we are to avoid these sorts of problems then we need good engineers and good engineering practice.

The problem are usually not caused by bad engineers but by decisions of the management and insufficient communication between different network providers. Point in case, the town centre of my hometown is on an island connected with 4 bridges. Now have a guess where the 3 local telecommunication providers put their cables. That’s right, they all used the same bridge.

The architecture of the Internet used to resemble a richly-connected graph, with lots of interconnections between the many different levels of network that work together to give us global coverage, but this is no longer the case.

I’d be interested to see some hard data on this issue. The relation of available bandwidth per link of backbone providers and “normal” networks has surely changed over the years, however I’m not sure if there are less interconnections per network than in the past.

“I’d be interested to see some hard data on this issue.”

I’m sure the folks at NANOG would oblige.

I’m not sure what Halcyon days are being referred to, probably the one where everyone in Australia paid per bit, one cable left the continent, and people worried that virtually the entire Far East routed phone and data along one cable along the Malay peninsula, and through lots of politically unstable countries of the mid-East, and Eastern Europe.

We definitely have more cables these days, whether people are prepared to pay to use them is another matter entirely.

Describing the actual (or at least observable) state of affairs in straightforward terms is difficult. Overall the Internet’s logical structure-the patterns formed by the 25,000 or so institutional “nodes” (Autonomous Systems) that manage Internet routing, plus the many millions of “edges” or links that interconnection them to each other-form a steep hierarchy, or what systems theorists call a “scale- free graph”. That is to say, the biggest Internet networks are *very* big (meaning they directly broker Internet connectivity for a very large number of users and devices) and *very* well-connected compared to the next largest group of networks, which in turn is very big relative to the next tier, and so on. The bigness and connectedness generally covary across observable nodes.

Some academic researchers have observed that this steep hierarchy is consistent even over time, even across different portions of the Internet, e.g., portions associated with different individual countries. Some people (me, for example) might find this observation surprising, if not downright troubling, given the perception that markets change over time, and the sense that different countries seem to have very different market structures and communications network environments at any point in time, ranging from complete monopoly to radical “liberalization”, decentralization, and network diversity.

Although the degree of overall hierarchy is hard to dispute at this level of analysis, the apparent consistency or homogeneity observed by researchers is in fact a product of measurement error. The source of the error is the treatment of Autonomous Systems as the fundamental ontology or building blocks of the Internet - in effect as the sovereign entities of Internet traffic exchange. This approach is rendered questionable by the existence of even broader “Autonomous Routing Domains” (ARDs), which are composed of many (in some cases hundreds) of individual ASes, which are in fact directly controlled by a single decision maker (PSTN, commercial carrier, etc.). Such ARDs are not evenly distributed globally, and in fact some apparently diverified national network economies are composed almost entirely of one, or perhaps 2-3 ARDs. Fail to recognize these structures (which are not so transparently self-evident in the empirical data as are ASes) and you might easily assume that it’s all equally steep hierarchy, everywhere, all the time… but you would be wrong.

Some of the countries that were most severely impacted by the recent earthquake-related cable outages also play host to some of the largest and most locally dominant ARDs. Whether or not this is fact correlates with differences in degree of impact or duration of recovery remains to be explored…

In 1972 I was at System Development Corporation (SDC).  I was part of the R&D Group.  We worked on what is now called the internet.

It was expressly understood by us and our customer that we were building a network that would be (not “could be” - in those days we were certain that it would happen) subjected to nuclear attack, that nodes and links would be vaporized.  We designed machines and prototols with this in mind.

Survival of the network during nuclear war was not an ancillary aspect of our work, it was a core element.

So I would say that I disagree with those who say that the story that the early internet was designed to be robust in the face of nuclear war is merely an urban legend.

As for current day internet enginnering.

You’ve heard the old joke about a Microsoft engineer and a Boeing engineer getting onto a flight across the Pacific.  About an hour into the flight the Microsoft guy opens up his lapgop
and it immediately goes blue-screen.  The Boing guy looks at the laptop, looks at the airplane, and says “Aren’t you glad we don’t build airplanes the way you build software?”

Well, the internet is constructed of software that is not much better.  I’m in the business of testing internet protocol applications.  And from where I sit, it’s my sense that there is a lot of “it runs in the lab, ship it to customers” mentality out there in internet software land.

And I don’t mean this casually - just note, for example today’s report that Cisco IOS can crash if it receives an unsolicited SIP packet.

Are we doing good engineering?  Take a look at SIP.  I’ve been to several SIP interoperability events.  The common complaint is that SIP is a mess - that it has too many equivalent, but different encoding methods, that it is more like a bulletin board with everybody’s favorite idea nailed on.

The internet is becoming a lifeline utility - people are starting to depend on it for health and safety.

But in order to achieve the network robustness needed to meet that expectation we need to reinvent out engineering practices, and also, I believe, to adopt legal liability for engineering

A couple of years ago I gave a presentation on this topic:

From Barnstorming to Boeing - Transforming the Internet Into a Lifeline Utility (Powerpoint)
Speaker’s notes (Acrobat)

Interesting remarks, Karl. The question of “are we doing good engineering” (in protocol design) raises another question: do we have any kind of consensus on what constitutes good engineering in protocol design? There seems to be a dearth of literature on the subject. Where is the protocol design bible? We have a couple of classic papers, like the “end-to-end principle” paper, but where can one read about good protocol design in general?