Even an extreme disruption of international connectivity would not seriously threaten the survival of Web content itself. A “hard” copy of most data is stored in nonvolatile memory, which sticks around with or without power, and whether you have Internet access to it or not. Furthermore, according to William Lehr, an MIT economist who studies the economics and regulatory policy of the Internet-infrastructure industries, the corporate data centers that harbor Web content — everything from your emails to this article — have sophisticated ways to back up and diversely store the data, including simply storing copies in multiple locations. Google even stores cached copies of all Wikipedia pages; these were accessible on Jan. 18 when Wikipedia took its own versions of the pages offline in protest of SOPA and PIPA. This diversified storage plan keeps the content itself safe, but it also offers some protection against loss of access to any one copy of the data in the event of a cyberwar.
The redundancy of so much online content and of connectivity routes makes the Internet resilient to physical attacks, but a much more serious threat to its status quo existence is government regulation or censorship. “ISPs have direct control of the Internet, so what happens in any country depends on the control that the state has over those ISPs. Some countries regulate the ISPs much more heavily.
Governments could also simply tax Internet access, or providers could jack up the prices, in such a way as to price it out of reach of most people. Lehr added that, while no single government could destroy the Internet everywhere, it could certainly cripple it sufficiently to render its use unattractive for people within its country of governance.
Bad regulation, be it in any particular country or on the international scale, could severely hamper the Internet’s value and its ability to grow, Lehr said. While some version of the Internet is likely to exist as long as humanity does, what might be lost or greatly diminished is “the openness of the Internet.”
This openness is useful both economically and socially, but it is also a source of problems, Lehr noted; it lends itself to endless security and privacy attacks, junk mail, viruses, malware and so on. He believes new security models must be developed to protect privacy and security while still allowing the Internet to function.
“Whether we can effectively strike that balance is a difficult challenge and work in progress.”
