Why the inventor of Ethernet ate his magazine column on stage

The internet is an essential part of daily life for billions of people and if it stopped working the impact would be immense. Despite the increased number of threats, it keeps running. How? And why does it remain as resilient today as it has ever been?

Since its inception 40 years ago, the internet has shown remarkable resilience, one of its key success factors. From its origins as a research project, it has grown into the world’s primary platform for trade, communications and entertainment. 

There have been plenty of challenges to its operations, and temporary outages affect users in different regions from time to time. Experts have often predicted the collapse or disintegration of the internet. Yet it keeps on working. The internet today is vastly different from what its original inventors envisioned, but the basic building block technologies underpinning the internet have survived and are now more important than ever.

Three dimensions of internet resilience

1. Resilience in the physical infrastructure

The internet was built to route around potential blockages. When a part of the network fails, routing protocols find new paths to keep traffic moving. 

The internet is a network of networks, and the number of links that interconnect these networks is steadily growing. There have been historical examples of cable cuts that have affected internet performance in large regions, like the earthquake that damaged eight submarine cables, used to carry traffic between continents, off the coast of Taiwan in 2006. This caused massive disruptions in the region but also led to an increased awareness of the importance of submarine cables. 

More recently, measurements have shown how cable cuts in the Baltic Sea in 2025 had a very limited impact on internet performance thanks to the availability of alternative paths. 

While physical disruptions continue to be a challenge to some regions or individual networks, the internet overall benefits from its ability to run over a multitude of different networks and technologies, including traditional telephone networks, fibre networks, mobile broadband and satellite systems.

2. Resilience against malicious attacks 

The first large and inadvertent test of the internet’s resilience to threats took place in 1988, when Robert Morris developed a program to assess the size of the internet. The program exploited vulnerabilities in email software and weak or missing passwords, causing computers to slow down by replicating itself. While it did not cause permanent damage, the ‘Morris Worm’ ended up temporarily disabling as many as 10% of computers connected to the internet at the time. 

Since then, there have been many large-scale attempts to disrupt the internet, often targeting central functions like the domain name system (DNS). The DNS translates domain names into IP addresses, which allow browsers to find websites and other internet resources. An attack on the DNS, for example, could result in some websites becoming inaccessible.

The decentralised and distributed nature of the internet, however, makes it very resilient to malicious attacks, since there is no single connection point or control centre that can be targeted. 

3. Resilience in protocols and architecture

In 1995, Robert Metcalfe, the inventor of Ethernet and founder of 3Com, published a column predicting that the internet would collapse in the face of challenges such as congestion. In 1996, he conceded he had been wrong and publicly followed through on his earlier promise to eat his column.¹ 

There have also been other worries about the fundamental stability of the internet. By 1990, the collapse of the routing system was being predicted, due to fear that the internet would run out of IP address blocks. In the early 2000s, the scalability of the routing protocol that binds the internet together was questioned, with a worry that the growth in networks would cause routing to collapse under an ever-increasing stream of route changes. 

While we should not take the stability of the internet for granted, the basic internet protocols have proven remarkably resilient. 

The resilience of the internet plays a significant role in its continuing success

The internet’s success is largely due to its openness, simplicity and decentralisation. These principles guided its original design and have allowed it to scale and evolve over time. The early internet developers created a technical architecture that has shown an astonishing ability to scale and adapt to changes in both application requirements and network technologies. As governments, academics, standardisation bodies and private companies continue to build and evolve the internet, it is important to remember the original guiding principles that have contributed to its success.² 

¹ At the annual conference where he had originally made his prediction, Metcalfe ripped up his column, put it in a blender with water, and ate the result.

² A more elaborate discussion of the technical success factors of the internet is given in our report for APNIC/LACNIC.