From Wired – Mother Earth Mother Board, via Alex Burns:
In defense of telephony people, it must be pointed out that they are the ones who really know the score when it comes to sending bits across oceans. Netheads have heard so much puffery about the robust nature of the Internet and its amazing ability to route around obstacles that they frequently have a grossly inflated conception of how many routes packets can take between continents and how much bandwidth those routes can carry. As of this writing, I have learned that nearly the entire state of Minnesota was recently cut off from the Internet for 13 hours because it had only one primary connection to the global Net, and that link went down. If Minnesota, of all places, is so vulnerable, one can imagine how tenuous many international links must be.
Relying on technical acumen, the self-organisation of the internet and hacking classes won’t be enough. Censorship must become legally untenable, not just technically.
While I agree that Censorship should not be permitted, it's worth pointing out that Stephenson's (fantastic) article is from December 1996. The Minnesota disconnection event itself was in July 1995. Australia's position isn't as fantastic as a bandwidth geek like me might like, but we've got three true high-capacity links (all capable of terabit capacities, although none of them are running at anything like that capacity just yet though), with a bunch of others that aren't too bad either.
mmm, that's true, but I think the point is still valid – telecommunications infrastructure isn't as redundant as people assume, and simply having faith that the structure of internet communications will allow us to simply route around censorship is distinctly problematic…