The Internet Will Crash, We Need A Plan B

Speech

Okay so who here uses the Internet? Just kidding... Everyone here does. So what if were to tell you, that one day, the Internet is going to crash. That's right. No more Ariana Grandé tweets, no more hashtag abuse, and no more SELFIES!!!! But also, phones: useless. Tablets: usless. Some forms of televisions: Useless. Even certain petrol pumps: useless. The fact is, the world has become so dependant on the Internet that we are using it for way more than it was designed for, and sooner or later, its going down.

Considering that the Internet was originally designed just for delivering messages via email, and that the Internet hasn't been upgraded all that much since the change from the ARPANET to the Internet, we are currently overloading the capabilities of the Internet by connecting everything from the latest apple products to fuel pumps. What I'm trying to get at here is that we have become overly reliant on the Internet. We have spent so much time increasing the security of the Internet that nobody has really thought of a plan b. I mean, what happens if the Internet just dies one day? It would be like being sent back to the 1980s, except with the cruel memory of one of the biggest innovations of mankind lingering in our minds.

So the fact is that there's a lot of bad guys on the Internet these days, and so we dealt with that by making walled communities, secure subnetworks, VPNs, little things that aren't really the Internet but are made out of the same building blocks, which were based off an assumption of trust. And that means that it's vulnerable to some mistakes that can happen or even certain kinds of deliberate attacks, but even the mistakes can be bad.

So, for instance, in all of Asia recently, it was impossible to get YouTube for a little while because Pakistan made some mistakes in how it was censoring YouTube in its internal network. They didn't intend to stuff up Asia, but they did because of the way that the protocols work. Another example, is that a couple of years ago, all the planes west of Mississippi in America were grounded all because a single routing card in Salt Lake City had a bug in it. Now you may think that the aeroplane system doesn't run on the Internet and in some sense it doesn't. But the fact is that something went wrong with the Internet and the routing card went down.

And so, there are many of those things that start to happen. Now, there was an interesting thing that happened last year. All of a sudden, a very large percentage of the traffic on the whole Internet, including a lot of the traffic between U.S. military installations, started getting re-routed through China. So for a few hours, it all passed through China. Now, China Telecom says it was just an honest mistake, and it is actually possible that it was, the way things work, but certainly somebody could make a dishonest mistake of that sort if they wanted to, and it shows you how vulnerable the system is even to mistakes. Imagine how vulnerable the system is to deliberate attacks.

As you can probably see, we need a plan b. Currently there is no plan b. There is no system that has been completely kept separate from the current Internet. What we need is a new system made from completely different building blocks to the Internet. It doesn't necessarily have to have the same performance as the Internet, but we need something that keeps us from being sent back to the 1980s when the current Internet crashes. It doesn't need to be a multi-billion dollar government project. It's actually not that difficult to do,technically, because it can use the fibres already in the ground, the existing wireless system. It's just a matter of deciding to do it.

The problem is that people won't decide to do it until we see a need for it and by that point it will be already too late. Sure people have been thinking about it for years, but that's all they have been doing. Thinking. It's very hard to get people focused on plan b when plan a seems to be working so well. Especially since nobody wants to be that one guy sitting in the corner at a party, muttering about the end of the world.

Thank you all very much.