The resilience of the Internet is being tested. Concentration in a small number of providers, fragile physical infrastructure, and geopolitical tensions have created deep systemic dependencies. Natural hazards, technical failures, and political interventions can expose these weaknesses, triggering cascading disruptions across providers, layers, and services. The impact extends beyond infrastructure to how the Internet is developed, engineered, and governed.

A fundamental rethinking of Internet resilience is urgent.

This Dagstuhl Seminar examines Internet resilience as a systemic property of interdependent systems in which infrastructure, concentration, and governance interact. It focuses on four connected questions:

1. how to measure resilience in ways that capture dependencies, performance, and user experience;
2. how to identify and model concentration, dependencies, and cascading failures across the Internet ecosystem;
3. what information operators, regulators, and policymakers need to turn technical and analytical results into effective decisions; and
4. how standardisation and governance must evolve to strengthen resilience.

Internet resilience cannot be solved by technical means alone. Addressing it requires aligning measurement and system design with economic incentives, governance, and regulation. This seminar aims to bring together researchers, operators, industry practitioners, economists, and policy experts to connect these perspectives and develop a more integrated understanding of resilience.

The seminar aims to improve how resilience is measured, deepen understanding of dependencies and cascading failures, clarify which challenges can be addressed through technical design and which require governance or regulation, and define a concise agenda for future research and decision-making.

Creative Commons BY 4.0

Ignacio Castro, Theophilus A. Benson, Dirk Kutscher, and Jane R. Coffin