[CII] Advocatus Diaboli

[Maher, Kevin]

As part of the thought experiment I'll self-servingly propose that both eBay
and amazon would be unable to recover, as online-only e-commerce companies
with no physical presence.  I work for eBay and will restrict my comments to
what I know about our business, although I'm also a satisfied amazon
customer (ssh).  I'm also excluding PayPal's business model as I think it
warrants separate consideration.

I doubt any of these companies are considered "sufficiently important" or
critical for anything other than themselves, but a statistic often quoted by
eBay execs is that 750,000+ people use ebay for their primary or secondary
source of income.  The site is important to them.  I do accept the fact that
the world can live without eBay, and newspaper classified ads could make a
big comeback.

I'll assert that the creativity etc that goes into the neato
packet-radio/POTS/BBS system that we put up as a replacement will fall
significantly short of meeting the present needs of our buyers and sellers.
It would be nothing remotely approaching what eBay is today, and would
ultimately have less than 10% of our current transaction volume.  Most of my
colleagues would obviously lose their jobs.  Not me though, I'm too
important -- have to at least give me that in my own thought experiments.

As for other online-only content providers and online-only marketplaces, I
think they would all devolve to mailorder catalogs at best.  I'd be
interested to hear whether gmail, yahoo, or others would be considered
critical.

Kevin

On 12/1/09 2:37 AM, "Felix 'FX' Lindner" <fx at recurity-labs.com> wrote:

> 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