UNAFFORDABLE ‘NET LOSS

An unsurprising but important study from the Business Roundtable concludes the nation is unprepared for a major natural or manmade assault on the Internet. The economic costs of a broad failure of the Internet for weeks would be huge, as would the government’s ability to direct services for safety and health workers.

The business group, made up of the chief executives of the nation’s 160 largest corporations, performs a service by pointing these out. Doing something about them, however, is considerably more difficult.

Evidence that it is difficult comes from 2001, when the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, the group that manages domain names, worried about what would happen if the Internet was attacked by terrorists and its servers were to fail simultaneously. The protection from that possibility couldn’t be entirely anticipated five years ago, apparently, because the Business Roundtable is still worrying about it, as well as about malicious viruses, Hurricane Katrina-like storms and other types of destruction.

The Roundtable’s answer, for the government, is to form an emergency action plan, and, for the private sector, to create cyber recovery teams. The primary benefit members of the Roundtable can provide is pressure on Washington to stay focused on the issue long enough to see measurable improvements.

The Roundtable report does observe that over the last decade several technical challenges on issues such as security have been addressed by government – though the recent lost laptops and lost or improperly posted government personnel data suggest that system isn’t perfect – but it argues that recovery from failure hasn’t been properly understood. “The nation is unprepared to set in motion the kind of coordinated response needed to repair Internet infrastructure in the event of a massive Internet disruption,” its report concludes.

Individual Internet users will never have the clout or the incentive to make large investments in preventing or recovering from Internet failure. But an influential business group can make enough noise to be heard in Congress. Perhaps an email campaign is in order.