[norea-armozel]

This is why I worry about the centralization of all communications as we've done over the entirety of human history. Letting the Internet be centralized as it has been might be make economic sense but as for sustaining the world economy through a potentially global conflict it doesn't make any sense to put all our eggs in one basket here. It's like I mentioned on the "napalm girl" post that we've become too complacent with having ease of use trump reliability of communication. This is just one of the larger consequences of our individual and collective choices coming to bite us in the butt. I hope this spurs people to get smarter and put together p2p solutions that can weather such a conflict at least for regional and/or city-wide communications.

[Grishnakh]

The internet is decentralized, for the most part; it was designed to be that way from the start. Whole pieces of the internet can go offline that the rest of it will continue operating as normal, with packets routed around the damage. The TCP and IP protocols were designed for this.

It's not the designers fault that so many people are dumb enough to happily give one company a near-monopoly over certain forms of communication.

It's very simple: stop using Facebook for everything. Use different sites/services, or switch to a decentralized service like Diaspora. Otherwise, stick with Facebook for everything and stop complaining when it bites you in the butt, and suffer the consequences when disaster strikes.

[norea-armozel]

You're confusing the issue by focusing on protocols versus actual physical implementations (data centers, trunk lines, etc). The physical installations for what we call the Internet are centralized. Companies like Level 3 might put some redundancy but at some point the cost of redundancy out weighs its benefits for them and other companies like them. This is especially true of consumer financial services like banking. If an attacker wanted to disrupt the United States they only have to do it to banking to cause a panic. They could easily ignore emergency services, hospitals, and even the government itself (outside of ACH) while doing this. And it would be such a mess that we couldn't resolve it immediately. The happiest outcome is the disruption is only for a few hours but the more likely outcome is possibly days or weeks of disruption where a large part of the banking system would be inoperable. It doesn't matter if you used TCP/IP or switch based communications the outcome is the same: the American economy shaken and possibly worse. So, we can take all day about Facebook and Diaspora but neither of those services do anything important for the average user like your bank which also uses the same centralized infrastructure. There is no Diaspora for banking and not one that's widely used or not using the current banking/financial transfer systems which are centralized.