An article on TechCrunch (“Wikipedia Bans Qatar“) caught my attention this evening, so I followed the conveniently provided link to see what Wikipedia had to say about the situation.

The problem, it seems, is that Qatar has only one ISP that provides high-speed Internet access; and that effectively means every Internet user in the country shares the same IP address. That’s not a problem in itself; but Wikipedia has apparently been deluged by a large volume of spam and vandalism sent by anonymous (unregistered) users to its site. So the Wikipedia overlords decided that the only practical approach was to block any further postings (e.g., creation of new articles, editing of existing articles) by anonymous users with that IP address. Read Wikipedia’s explanation (via the link mentioned above), and Mike Arrington’s commentary (in his TechCrunch article) for more details.

I don’t have anything to add to Mike’s commentary, nor am I inclined to second-guess Wikipedia’s decision. But it got me to thinking: what would happen if we suddenly found ourselves unable to access, say, Google? Or Wikipedia? Or the web sites of the New York Times, the Washington Post, or a handful of outspoken bloggers? For that matter, what if we were unable to access the Internet at all?

The last scenario is one of many “cyber-war” scenarios that the government is constantly assessing. I was one of several participants in a “war game” held at the Naval War College a few years ago, and four different teams were able to put together some fairly credible plans to bring down the Internet, the nation’s telecommunications network, the electric power grid, and the banking system — all at the same time. Presumably there were subsequent war games where other individuals tried to figure out ways to prevent, or recover from, such attacks; and I’m sure that both attackers and defenders have become much more sophisticated during the ensuing few years.

In any case, I don’t spend much time worrying about the “total shutdown” scenario, if only because there’s absolutely nothing that I could personally do about it. And I don’t worry about finding myself living in a tiny country like Qatar, with only one ISP providing access to the Internet. But the Qatar incident does make me wonder about the likelihood of individuals (you, me, or the neighbor next door), or small companies, or big companies, or whole communities suddenly finding themselves shut off from specific services or providers that (a) we take for granted, and (b) we’ve come to depend upon.

Worms, viruses, denial-of-service (DoS) attacks, and other such attacks might be one source of the problem; and such attacks could conceivably be aimed at either the provider/supplier of the service, or the consumer/user. And one obvious solution is redundancy: if I can’t access the Internet via the cable-modem service in my office, I can use my high-speed wireless modem that’s provided by a different vendor; and if that doesn’t work, I take my laptop (which also functions as my desktop computer, with an attachment to a full-size keyboard and a humongous display screen) and walk down the street to the nearest Starbucks coffee shop. It’s more difficult, of course, if I’m the manager of a company with a dozen, or a hundred, or a thousand knowledge workers who simply can’t carry out their day-to-day work without Internet access. I’d be willing to bet that less than 10% of businesses around the U.S. have a practical contingency plan for dealing with a really serious, prolonged DoS attack.

What about a disruption on the part of our providers? Switching ISP’s is one thing — but what about switching, say, Google? For me, it’s no big deal: there are plenty of other search engines out there. But for a lot of small businesses — especially the Web 2.0 companies springing up everywhere — Google is more than just a search engine. With its click-through advertising mechanisms, it’s a source of revenue, or a source of marketing leads, or both. Indeed, for some companies it may be the primary, or even the only, source of revenue. The joke used to be that if terrorist dropped a large bomb on Redmond, Washington, the entire country would come to a screeching halt because of the importance of Microsoft; these days, it might do nothing more than provide the justification everyone has been waiting for to escape to Linux or the Mac.

But what if Osama aims his next hijacked plane at the Googleplex? The mind boggles…