[CII] Advocatus Diaboli

[Felix 'FX' Lindner]

Hi list,

since the discussion about CI/CII exploded already into an
n-dimensional problem space, I would like to approach it from a
completely different angle and pose the following question as a
THOUGHT EXPERIMENT for discussion:

****************
Which governmental or commercial entity would be unable to recover
from a global and ongoing Internet outage?
****************

As we can define rules for thought experiements, here are the ones for
this:

1) 
We shall not know what the reason of the outage is. Simply assume
whereever you connect to the Internet, it simply doesn't work (no
routing, no DNS).

2) 
We shall assume that POTS (Plain Old Telephony System) is still
functioning. [Note: we all know that POTS cores are all VoIP these
days, but it's a thought experiment, so just play along] 

4) 
We shall assume that all other types or infrastructure are still
functioning, including power distribution, water and utilities.
[Note: we all know the argument that those may fail with Internet
outages, but it's a thought experiment, so just play along]

5)
How much of any localized networks will still work is up to the
participant of the thought experiment, but you shall reason why
something still works.

Working hypothesis:
Any sufficiently important entity will apply creativity, priorization
and extra effort to get around the operational problems caused by the
unavailability of the Internet at large. The impact on societies and
their ability to support and protect human lives will be significantly
lower than commonly assumed.

Goal of the thought experiment:
By identifying one or more entities that are unable to recover by any
means from a global and ongoing Internet outage, we might be able to
assess criticality of such entity, criticality of Internet components
as well as mitigation strategies that people would employ if forced to
using *actual*examples*.

Enjoy,
FX

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