What if the Internet breaks?

This article was originally published by MSN Money, on Thursday, Dec. 10, 2009.

The 40-year-old system might be vulnerable to technical collapse and cyberattack, which could cause widespread chaos in fields from banking to health care to government.

By Katherine Reynolds Lewis

When your Internet service goes down, it's at best an inconvenience. If you rely on it for business, it can quickly cost you money.

So imagine: What happens if the Internet breaks?

Picture people wandering the streets lost without GPS or maps on their iPhones, unable to pay for food or other goods with a simple swipe of a card.

Companies would have to resort to faxes and phone calls instead of e-mail; they'd quickly reach capacity and be unable to function. Credit cards wouldn't work; stores and hospitals would run short of supplies. Even electrical power to our homes could be disrupted.

"It would be a mess," said Dave Marcus, the director of security research for McAfee. "You would be taking businesses that were designed to do all their point-of-sale and financial transactions through the Internet and going back to pen and paper and taking checks in a car to the bank. People would lose their minds."

On the 40th anniversary of the first transmission over the earliest version of the Internet, it's more than an idle question to examine the network's fragility. It's been more than 20 years since the last systemwide overhaul, and Internet infrastructure is still based on 1970s ideas about computer networks.

Headline-making outages of popular Web sites such as YouTube and Twitter merely hint at the damage a full-blown failure could wreak. The Internet protocols that allow computers to communicate in networks have infiltrated every sector of our economy.

"The Internet has moved from being a toy or ornament to something that's central to our economy," said James Lewis, a senior fellow at CSIS, a nonprofit think tank in Washington, D.C. "We've automated all these processes, which makes our economy much more efficient, which means cheap. But it also means we're now dependent."

Infrastructure Needs Reform

By Katherine Reynolds Lewis
c.2007 Newhouse News Service

WASHINGTON — Money alone won't spare the U.S. another tragedy like Wednesday's bridge collapse in Minneapolis. Transporation experts say government must also reform its piecemeal approach to investment in the nation's public works.

"We have the largest civil infrastructure in the world, but also it is the oldest,'' said Riyad Aboutaha, a professor of civil engineering at Syracuse University. "We do not repair it until it reaches a critical stage.''

But if $1.6 trillion fell from the sky to bring roads, bridges, airports and water systems into good condition — the amount the American Society of Civil Engineers says is needed over five years — the nation might soon face the same issues it does today, experts said.

The problem is the lack of any comprehensive, rational system. Three separate federal laws authorize money for airports, highways and water, and different jurisdictions squabble over whose piece of pie is bigger.

Every year, localities push forward their most urgent projects, and the state or federal government decides what hits the jackpot. With 90 percent federal highway financing, there's a strong incentive for local jurisdictions to wait for the next year's gravy train instead of tackling projects on their own, said Everett Ehrlich, who has examined the issue for the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

"We don't have a system that lets us know which the best things to build are,'' Ehrlich said. "The policies we have were put in place 50 years ago or more, to get stuff built but not to maintain it.''

The stakes are high.