Internet Resilience in a Time of Crisis

The Non-Paper Session will take place at Room Auditorium.

The Internet has outgrown its origin story. Once an academic experiment, it’s now the backbone of modern life, quietly enabling commerce, governance, health, education, and daily communication. But despite its central role, the Internet remains a surprisingly fragile system. Recent disruptions, such as cable cuts in the Red Sea, shutdowns during conflicts, disputes over control of satellite networks, highlight just how exposed the Internet’s physical and governance layers are to global instability. These aren’t rare anomalies; they’re early signals of a system under strain. At the same time, consolidation across cloud, transit, and infrastructure layers is concentrating control and amplifying systemic risk. This session asks: What does resilience mean in today’s Internet? Who defines it, and how do we ensure the research community contributes to the answers? It’s time to broaden the conversation, beyond performance and scalability, to include resilience, diagnosability, and governance. And to ensure that research keeps pace with the infrastructure, it seeks to understand.

The session will feature Dr. Amreesh Phokeer (ISOC), Dr. Johanna Ullrich (SBA Research), and Dr. Adrian Perrig (ETH Zurich). Structured around three core questions—what we know, what we can influence, and what resilience demands—the panel will open with a short framing, followed by concise position statements from each panelist, and then move into moderated discussion and audience Q&A. The emphasis is on bridging technical research with policy and operational practice, and fostering new connections across disciplines and sectors.