What if the Internet went down...and didn't come back up? - Network World

Well, what if the Internet went down...and didn't come back up? Some say:

It ain't gonna happen. ... "The loss of the Internet for days, weeks or permanently would mean more than just an end to annoying spam and being cut off from the ideal way to settle bar arguments. The ongoing explosion of virtual business services of all sorts, accounting, payroll and even sales would come to a halt, and so would many companies. Customer service could still be handled by phone, except where the phone system was Internet-based. Much more severely affected would be complex project management between companies, especially those projects based on shared CAD (computer-assisted design) files or even shared PERT (Program Evaluation and Review Technique) files. On the other side of the discussion, however, only about 20 percent of respondents to an Internet poll on potential failures thought that loss of Internet corporate communications and collaboration would be catastrophic and 10 percent thought it would have no effect at all."

Some approach it from the positive side:

As a futurist I like to use a different perspective-let's identify good things associated with an end-of-total-connectivity apocalypse and work our way toward a middle ground."

And if we lost the Internet could we do without it?

Neither De Jager nor May thinks we would even try. Says de Jager, "We wouldn't do that. We'd recreate the Internet."

Added May, "Would Net2 that would be erected to replace Net1 be better? And how long would it take to get Net2 up?"