Consolidation and centralization can be a good thing when you're trying to pay off credit card debt, but it's turning out to be a bad thing when it comes to the ways the World Wide Web works and the ways to keep it secure.
TV host Glenn Beck recently noted that recent outages that temporarily shut down large portions of the Internet prove that it's not's some kind of centralized "magic cloud. It is really a house of cards."
Pioneering computer engineer Alex Fredericks calls that "a pretty fair assessment. It's like saying the electrical grid infrastructure in the United States is as up to date as it could be. We all know that it's not."
"The internet, unfortunately, was built on pipes and rails that have not enough 'diversification' in them, so the ability to take out one company like a Cloudflare that fills a lot of holes for people, it acts as the 'bouncer' if you would, for everything from X and Spotify to ChatGPT to your basic run-of-the-mill websites, can be deceptively enormous.
"If you can attack with any kind of vim and vigor you can really do some real damage."
And one of the ways that make it easy is, if you can find your way into one series of computers, servers and ISPs and hack them, you've disrupted a serious portion of infrastructure because of their centralization.
"And the funny thing is that can feed into another theory that I call the 'Internet is dead' theory, simply meaning that the Internet has been captured by everything under the sun," Fredericks adds.
"But the reality is Cloudflare had a bug issue in one of their bots, so they're running in automation something that, well, 'house of cards' is a good description.
"It's Jenga -- you pull the wrong piece, everything's gonna fall."
That's just the way it was built, and it would take very extensive work to change it for the better.
"A lot of the Internet runs on just a handful of infrastructure operations, and that means that everything from your healthcare to your food delivery service could go dark when companies like Cloudflare -- or Amazon, the only other big boy in the room, Amazon Web Services -- when they're attacked," Fredericks says.
Perhaps the most concerning part of this scenario is that it would take a major rebuild of portions of the web in order to correct many of these problems. and as it is today, there could be an attack on the Internet and authorities may not know who did it.
"There are enough intelligent, dubious people in the world that you don't have to even be an organized nation state" to attack the grid in several different modest-to-catastrophic ways, he adds, that could result in noticeable damage all the way to, again, catastrophe.