by Abinyah Walker
Like a city, the internet's foundation relies on an infastructure made up of private and public projects. Since the internet is really a network linking private and pubilc subnetworks, this tangle of interconnectedness makes it difficult to create a reliable backup in the event of failure. The earthquake off the cost of Taiwan on Decmber 26 registered a 7.1, disrupting internet links between China and the rest of the world. Backup links to the US were established after the submarine links between China and Taiwan were severed, but new links to the US are slower and the distance makes them more vulnerable. But as pointed out in The Internet -- A Fragile System Threatened By Natural Disaster- SpaceDaily - the internet's main ROOT servers are logated in Virgina, where a single failure caused by natural dissaster, hackers or a nuclear strike (causing an EMP) could knock out the entire network, private and public.
The end of the millenium brought criticism from the UN that that countries in control of ROOT Servers should disperse control of the top-level-domain to indivdual countries.
The fear being that the controlling country could disconnect other countries from the internet abscent the effects of a natural dissaster.
Internet power politics is very real, and the US/China bi-yearly meetings into economic engineering the "strategic economic dialogue" coinciding with the internet blackout has brought China's digital vulnerability to light. It is conceivable that the US, the controller of the ROOT server, may exploit this mastery of the digital-economy and its control of the internet to pressure China and other world economies.
