Internet: What Would We Do If the Internet Crashed? - by Amanda Wills

Internet

In 1982, the Internet was a safe place where everyone trusted each other. The community was so small that every email address on the web could fit into one skinny "phone book" written in big font. If you made that same book today, it would be 25 miles thick.

Scientist Danny Hillis was one of the few people in that small digital community. In a recent TED Talk, Hillis says the Internet's current population exposes a new vulnerability. "The Internet was designed with the assumption that the communications links could not be trusted, but that the people that connected computers to the Internet were smart and trustworthy," Hillis tells Mashable via email. "Those assumptions no longer apply." We depend on the Internet for nearly everything, and we cannot imagine what would happen if it just quit working.

But with the influx of what Hillis describes as "bad and foolish people" who connect to the web, a massive breakdown may be in our future.
 
Hillis tells stories of gaping security holes that have already led to incidents of our exposed vulnerability because we are using the Internet in services for which it wasn't originally built. It now supports the basic infrastructure of our society: funds transfers, shipping of food and oil, transportation and even the telephone system.

"We're setting ourselves up for a kind of disaster like the [one] we had with the financial system, where we take a system that was basically built on trust — was basically built for a smaller scale system — and we've kind of expanded it way beyond the limits of how it was meant to operate," Hillis explains in the video above.

Hillis says it's time to have a Plan B: an "alternative communications network that is entirely independent of the protocols of the Internet." As Hillis found out after his TED Talk, people are already working on these backup plans.

"Since this presentation, many people have told me those stories are only the tip of the iceberg," he says, noting that some of those people also told him about various efforts to fix these problems. "So, while I am concerned to hear that things are already worse than I assumed, I'm also heartened that smart minds are starting to focus on solutions," Hillis says. "Like so many other infrastructure problems, this one is likely to eventually get fixed. The question will be just how much pain we will have to accept before we fix it."

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