We’re often told that the internet was created back in the days of the cold war, an era in which an all-out nuclear exchange was perceived as a likely threat. The internet, so the story goes, was designed to cope with the destruction of nodes; the traffic will just route around the damaged segments. The net as a whole may run slower in its degraded state, but the traffic will still get through by one route or another.
Recent events such as the Mediterranean cable cuts of December 2008 remind us that although this ability to self-repair is to some extent true, in reality large sections of the net are actually connected to the other parts of the world by a small number of links, rather than a widespread grid of connections.
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