Four ways the Internet could go down - Lets Speculate

In the uncertain world we live in we often wonder what would happen if "X" was removed from the equation.  For instance what would you do if you didn't have a cell phone?  I know what I would do, heck there was a good portion of my life lived during those times and it wasn't all that bad.  Of course there was a think called a "Pay Phone" which has since been removed from street corners and bowling alleys across the country.

Another technology that we have taken for granted is the Internet, it brings endless hours of entertainment to us and is the lifeblood of companies and small nations across the globe.  The Internet is designed to be robust and redundant with very little chance of going down, short of some major event such as the ones in this article.

The fact that the Web has not stopped functioning in its initial decades sometimes encourages us to assume that it never will. But like any system, biological or man-made, the Internet has the potential to fail.

The third scenario discussed is most likely what will cause worldwide failures and in the event of world war it will be one of the first things to go in an attempt to protect domestic communications and prevent other countries from using it against us.

I do like the last comment in this article, it sounds so "high school" - Read on

I propose that we need to have a similar backup security plan for the human knowledge that underlies the Internet.

I'm not suggesting something like the Way Back Machine, which takes snapshots of websites through time. I'm instead talking about simple instructions, burned onto physical media, for how to generate electricity, how to build a computer, how to build a router and how to reconstitute the Internet from basic principles.

I could be wrong but I think he is talking about something we call a Book

Related Web URL: http://www.cnn.com/2012/07/10/tech/web/internet-do...