Imagine logging into your web browser and there’s just nothing: no websites anywhere. You check your internet connection, and that seems fine. Your phone seems to be working. Except most of the apps are showing error messages, and there are just no websites.
This is what would happen if the DNS system stops working. This is the system that turns your website request into an address the IP and HTTP systems can understand. And our DNS systems are incredibly fragile, completely out of date, and most are run by under supported volunteers. Yes, you read that right. One of the most important parts of the Internet sounds like it organised worse than your local primary school parent association.
We live in a fragile world – way more fragile than we know.
And the system could fall over at any time. It did so earlier this year, with a bad Microsoft update shutting down airports, banks and water processing plants for two days. That was a warning of worse things to come.
On that happy note… have a great weekend.
TRANSCRIPT
Imagine you switch on your browser and there’s just nothing there. No websites exist, and you get an error message with everything that you try. No, it’s not just because you’re using Microsoft Edge. This happens in every browser and it’s also not because your internet connection isn’t working, you’ve checked that and everything seems fine. Maybe it’s because the websites have just disappeared.
My name is Graeme Codrington. This is ThrowForward Thursday, where every week we jump into the future and see what might happen and discover if there’s anything to learn about it for today.
And today I want to talk about DNS, the Domain Name System, this is the system on which all websites are based. Every single website in the world with that www. and then domain name has to be registered in one of the various domain name systems that are available. Most countries have given one company the right to manage that registry, essentially to set up the database, the library of website names, and to convert the name that we have in our languages, convert that into the various numbers and dots and dashes that are required in the background for the Internet to actually find the right Internet protocol address, the correct IP address.
The technical details are not important, but what is important is that these DNS registry businesses are technically non-profit businesses, and in fact, many of them are actually run by volunteers. They’re not actually there as massive money-making opportunities, and although the big tech companies are supposed to be supporting these volunteer-led non-profit organisations, to just make sure that everything in the background is working.
We’ve had examples in the last few months, for example, that Cloudflare problem that happened when Microsoft just did an update, and one of the updates called a loop to one of these volunteer-led systems that basically hold the Internet together in the background. And something went wrong, and flights had to be cancelled, and all sorts of issues happened with banks, and It was a bit of chaos for a few days and weeks.
Well, that’s actually how the Internet is run. There might be beautiful websites on the front-end, but you go behind the scenes, and it’s like one of those old old-school Hollywood movies where the scene that you see up front for the cameras is held up in the background by a lot of duct tape and two-by-four panelling. It looks a little bit like it’s creaking and cracking and maybe about to fall over.
I’m making light of this a little bit and laughing nervously, but actually, the potential for the DNS system to fail, the potential for actually a significant number of these underlying foundational building blocks of the Internet to fail is actually quite large, and it’s going to take a significant effort by some of the biggest players in technology, in fact, actually a significant effort by almost everybody who does some work and has some involvement on the Internet and the World Wide Web to actually to change these things and to update these things to a more modern and more robust system.
Until that happens, we live in a world where it is possible that your websites and the apps that are linked to them may just stop working one day, and it will then take a few days or weeks to correct them. And all we can hope is that we are not in a situation where that becomes life-threatening for us when it happens in the moment.
There’s pretty much nothing you can do about this, except now feel a little bit more nervous about the world that you live in now that you know this information. My pleasure, what can I tell you?
This is ThrowForward Thursday, where we look at the future and we think about what might happen. Sometimes it’s bad, and this one is one of the worst. Have a great week, I’ll see you next week in the future again, I’ll try and make it a bit more upbeat next week.
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Graeme Codrington, is an internationally recognised futurist, specialising in the future of work. He helps organisations understand the forces that will shape our lives in the next ten years, and how we can respond in order to confidently stay ahead of change. Chat to us about booking Graeme to help you Re-Imagine and upgrade your thinking to identify the emerging opportunities in your industry.
For the past two decades, Graeme has worked with some of the world’s most recognised brands, travelling to over 80 countries in total, and speaking to around 100,000 people every year. He is the author of 5 best-selling books, and on faculty at 5 top global business schools.