Title: Towards measuring the geographic and political resilience of the internet

Authors: Annika Baumann; Benjamin Fabian

Addresses: Institute of Information Systems, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Spandauer Str. 1, 10178 Berlin, Germany ' Institute of Information Systems, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Spandauer Str. 1, 10178 Berlin, Germany

Abstract: Given the importance of the internet for worldwide communication and services, its resilience against attacks, accidents, or attempts of misusing political control becomes critical for businesses and society. This article focuses on the question how vulnerable specific geographical regions are to an internet access disruption or to censorship-based impediments due to governmental control. In particular, a new metric is developed that measures the geographical internet resilience on a country level. For this purpose several indices based on geography, technologies as well as control are combined into a single, rank-based score indicating the internet resilience of a particular country compared to others.

Keywords: internet resilience; geographical resilience; political resilience; autonomous systems; geography; censorship; vulnerability; risk; internet access disruption; government control.

DOI: 10.1504/IJNVO.2013.064465

International Journal of Networking and Virtual Organisations, 2013 Vol.13 No.4, pp.365 - 384

Received: 17 Dec 2013
Accepted: 11 May 2014
Published online: 06 Sep 2014 *

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