By Fumina Tanizaki
September 25, 2026
“If the Internet were to fail on a global scale, what would be needed to restart it?”
How would you answer this question?
This question became the starting point for the activities of the Internet Resilience Institute, which is currently working to improve the resilience of the Internet. The Internet Resilience Institute is a specialized organization established by the Marconi Society, an international non-profit organization dedicated to fostering the information and communication technology community. It brings together experts from technology, industry, and policy fields to identify challenges related to Internet resilience and to advance concrete initiatives.
The JPNIC blog will introduce the Internet Resilience Institute in two articles. This time, we will explore its founding history and the issues it addresses, focusing on the Internet Resilience Workshop held in November 2024.
The Birth of the Internet Resilience Institute and the Marconi Society
What is the Marconi Society?
The Marconi Society was founded in 1974 by Gioia Marconi Braga, daughter of Guglielmo Marconi, who made significant contributions to the development of wireless communication. It honors pioneering researchers and engineers in the field of communications technology and currently promotes research, collaboration, and programs related to digital inclusion and emerging technologies.
The background to the establishment of the Internet Resilience Institute
In November 2024, the Marconi Society hosted the “Internet Resilience Workshop” at the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) in Washington, D.C., an invitation-only meeting attended by approximately 30 experts. Experts were invited from a wide range of fields, including academia, industry, and the technology community. Over the course of a day and a half, they examined current Internet vulnerabilities and failure factors, and discussed concrete measures to strengthen resilience in light of emerging technologies. The workshop was structured in small breakout sessions to encourage participant engagement. After each session, all participants gathered to hear reports from the session leaders and engage in discussions facilitated by a facilitator, leading to the identification of common themes and recommended actions.
The starting point for the discussions in this workshop was the question I mentioned at the beginning: “If the Internet were to fail on a global scale, what would be needed to restart it?” This question highlighted that Internet resilience is not merely a technical challenge, but a global coordination issue requiring cross-sector governance and shared accountability.
Participants
This workshop was conducted under Chatham House rules. Participant names are publicly available, but opinions and statements in the report are not linked to individuals or their affiliations.
The participants included Vint Cerf, known as a co-designer of TCP/IP; Steve Crocker, known for launching the RFC series; Paul Vixie, who contributed to the development of the DNS software BIND and DNS extensions; and Mark Nottingham, who has long led the standardization of web infrastructure technologies such as HTTP and QUIC. In addition, experts from major IT companies such as AWS, Cisco, Akamai, and Cloudflare, as well as organizations involved in Internet governance such as ICANN and the Internet Society (ISOC), and universities and research institutions also participated.
Now, let’s take a closer look at what was discussed at this workshop in November 2024.
Four major threats were identified at the workshop
System complexity
The interdependence between power infrastructure and Internet infrastructure creates a chain of dependencies, where one is essential for the other to function. Furthermore, modern software development methodologies are becoming increasingly complex. Applications rely on numerous APIs and third-party services, and their security is often opaque.
Increasing regulatory pressure
Regulatory and policy issues were highlighted as particularly pressing challenges at the workshop. Policy issues are expected to have a more direct impact on the development of the Internet over the next 10 to 20 years. As Internet-based services become more widespread, the traditional “deal with problems as they arise” approach of the technology community is no longer acceptable to governments and users. Given the Internet’s impact on all aspects of the economy and national security, governments are demanding clear accountability and rapid incident response from technology providers. These factors highlight the need to build and maintain constructive public-private partnerships.
Lack of funding for preventative measures
While reactive measures to address incidents easily attract funding and attention, crucial efforts to prevent failures in the first place—through proper operational practices and sufficient training—often receive insufficient funding. Furthermore, this challenge is further complicated by varying levels of information and understanding among stakeholders regarding incidents and their causes.
Vulnerabilities in the software supply chain
The workshop highlighted extensive reliance on open-source libraries that lacked sufficient validation and funding. Properly understanding these dependencies and responding to failures requires not only software expertise but also the knowledge and training of the personnel operating them. The workshop suggested that a systematic training curriculum should be developed, primarily targeting network operators, engineers, and senior executives (CIOs, CFOs, CISOs), to move away from knowledge transfer that relies on the personal experiences of experts—so-called “war stories.”
What these threats have in common is that they don’t view Internet resilience solely as a matter of protocols and devices. In addition to interdependence with other infrastructure, such as power, non-technical factors, such as software development, policies, organizational decision-making, and human resource development, also influence the overall resilience of the Internet.
The nine themes presented in the workshop
The proposals presented at the workshop were organized into the following nine comprehensive themes, covering best practices, accountability, infrastructure support mechanisms, operational practices, and human resource development.
- Best Practice Framework/Badge
- A common framework for evaluating organizational resilience will be established, and maturity levels and response status will be visualized through certifications such as badges.
- Accountability, initiative, and risk management
- Clearly define responsibility for resilience at all levels, from management to the front lines, and integrate it into risk management, including design, operation, and recovery.
- Building a system to support critical infrastructure
- We will establish a system to sustainably support software and services that are widely used but often suffer from a shortage of resources, such as funding and personnel.
- Building and promoting the “Always Be Rolling” program.
- We will continuously and automatically apply patches to the production environment, and on a daily basis, hone our operational capabilities to quickly recover when problems occur.
- Joint exercises and information sharing
- We will jointly conduct tabletop exercises simulating large-scale failures and create a system to securely share the knowledge gained from the exercises and measurement data related to resilience.
- Infrastructure and inter-sector dependencies
- Understand the interdependence of the Internet and other critical infrastructure, such as power, data centers, and water, and prepare for and mitigate cascading failures.
- Education and Human Resource Development
- To pass on knowledge to the next generation, we will establish a systematic education, training, and knowledge-sharing system.
- Governance and International Cooperation
- To protect the cross-border Internet infrastructure, we will promote international cooperation among technology organizations, governments, and industry.
- Evolving Resilience Goals
- In response to changes in usage patterns and threats, we will continuously review our objectives, anticipating multiple scenarios such as failures, attacks, recovery, and lack of support.
What is particularly interesting here is that RPKI validators and OpenSSL are cited as specific examples of critical infrastructure that needs support. These are essential foundational software that underpins the reliability and security of the Internet, but the report points out that a mechanism is needed to sustainably support them. This illustrates the difficulty of preventative measures, as the value of maintaining and improving even widely used foundational software is often not recognized during normal times.
In conclusion
This time, we introduced the Internet Resilience Institute, focusing on the discussions at the Internet Resilience Workshop in November 2024, which served as the starting point for its activities. From the awareness of the issues presented there, it is clear that the resilience of the Internet is not just a matter of protocols and devices. In addition to interdependence with other infrastructure, such as electricity, various factors surrounding technology, such as human resource development, funding for preventative measures, policies, and cooperation between organizations, influence the stability of the Internet.
There is no simple answer to the question posed at the beginning: “If the Internet were to fail on a global scale, what would be needed to restart it?” However, it is important to cooperate across sectors and organizations during normal times and prepare the necessary technology, personnel, funding, and operational systems. The Internet Resilience Institute functions as a forum for generating such discussions and collaborations.
In fact, since the 2024 workshop, we have engaged in discussions with diverse stakeholders at international conferences and forums, including ICANN meetings, and have advanced activities through sessions at the IGF Annual Meeting and working group activities. As a result, in June 2026, we published a resilience guide for SMEs and a report that visualizes the complex dependencies of Internet infrastructure. In the next article, we will introduce how the issues raised in the workshop have led to subsequent activities and achievements.
