Anchors away

Yes, I realize it’s spelled “aweigh.” I was making a point.

For those of you who haven’t heard about it yet, the Asian Internet outages that wreaked so much havoc on overseas business lately were caused–in part–by a ship’s anchor dragging over undersea cables. (You can read about it in WSJ)

The last time this happened, right before the holidays in 2006, a Taiwan earthquake was the proximate cause. Now, you can in some measure predict and protect against moderate earthquakes, but this time the outage was caused by the nautical equivalent of a cow kicking a lantern in Mrs. O’Leary’s barn, and that’s a lot harder to guard against.

When I was a tech reporter covering US federal computing, the nice guys at NIST learned of my fascination with gigantic networks and sent me a chuckle: Mae East was most vulnerable to attack from a sale-crazed Christmas shopper.

If there were a central home for the Internet (there isn’t), Mae East (more properly MAE, for Metropolitan Area Exchange) would be it. It’s still one of the leading network access points for the Internet, however; a gigantic switch that tends to get a lot of Internet vendors’ stuff, like routers and servers and whatnot, attached to it. If you used the Web on the eastern US seaboard, at least some part of what was on your screen traveled through MAE East.

MAE East resided in an underground parking garage in McLean, Virginia and, according to my NIST buddies, a few bricks and some drywall were all that separated our Internet service from a parking lot oooopsie. If Mrs. O’Leary backed the car a little too far while trying to control two sugar-jagged kids in the backseat…there goes the Web.

Somebody, they said, should point out that, since the Internet had really been primarily intended for non-mission-critical research, it would be well to think about that before allowing US commerce to become too reliant on the Web. Made for a really nice little story.

Fast forward to today, when world business, not just US business, regards the Web as the backbone of business communications. Organizations that do business with companies like Skype and Vonage (not to mention the traditional telcos around the world) use it for voice communications as well as data.

Now, one of the things I love about the Internet is its self-healing nature: Put an obstacle in its path, and the millions of systems and people that make up the Internet will quickly route around it. That makes regulating the Web something of a pain, even for countries where censorship is a way of life, but ensures that sooner or later the traffic will do what it wants to do.

But…all that (in fact IP protocol itself) is predicated on the ability to quickly reroute to somewhere else on the backbone. Cut a big enough trunkline…and what if there’s nowhere to reroute TO?

I’ve got a built-in homeland security advisor who says this worries the hell out of her. A few judicious chops–or the threat of them–could cripple world markets badly with much less of a enrage-and-rally effect than, say, another World Trade Center attack.

I’m thinking there’s an even more interesting scenario–what if Corporation 1 (or Country 1–in some parts of the world they’re almost the same thing) decides to gain competitive advantage by crippling its rival’s Internet access? I wonder if anyone’s tried it?

Just thinking out loud…

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