Beyond infrastructure: Internet ecosystem resilience and the public good

Abstract

Telecommunications networks have become one of modern society's critical infrastructures (CIs): things required for everyday life and without which widespread disruption can be expected. Historically, the responsibility for ensuring the resilience of their own infrastructures has lain with the individual network operators. However, the complex ways in which economic and social systems now depend crucially on the efficient functioning of an internet system comprised of multiple different operators across the three internet layers creates an additional value of network resilience that will not be adequately captured in the incentives facing any single operator alone. In these circumstances, society benefits from some collective co-ordination to address the externalities.

As befits a complex nexus of interacting systems, this paper provides a multidisciplinary exploratory examination of the concept of internet ecosystem resilience and its relationship to (foundations in) telecommunications resilience given the challenges posed by increasing systemic complexity. It finds existing arrangements addressing both physical infrastructure and cybersecurity resilience leave important gaps in internet ecosystem resilience, particularly when addressing the wider social and economic consequences of ecosystem interruption. More research into these consequences is indicated, and attention should also be given to addressing the gaps in funding network infrastructure resilience to address continuity in service and benefits accruing from application layer resilience when this is left to network infrastructure providers alone.