The internet was designed to not have any single point of failure. Supposedly this was to ensure a communications network would survive a nuclear attack, a presumption that has since been cast into doubt. It’s certainly the case that down at the invisible-to-us level of the internet’s basic plumbing, its early engineers came up with an extraordinarily flexible structure that didn’t require the net’s data – be it a single email or all the information that produces a web page full of text, video and images – to be lumped together and sent down the same digital road.

Source: The Irish Times June 10, 2021 04:30 UTC