The Disintegrating Net By Chris Knight

     As noted by Bret Stevens:

“Penetrated. Compromised. Subverted. Sabotaged. Dominated. Everyone wants to escape the system, and even a quarter of a million dollars can boost someone out of the rat race, so Western infrastructure is for sale. Find the right network tech or middle manager, buy him out, and he will hand over the keys to the kingdom. He has no loyalty to this society; he hates it. It forces him to commute through a wasteland every day to spend ten hours wasting his time convincing morons to stop doing moron things, and fixing errors made by other morons who were managed by imbeciles. If he gets a chance to sell out, he will do it, and delight in the destruction he causes because finally, he gets his revenge.”

     These remarks are addressed to an extreme vulnerability in the Western internet; think of it as like a big fishing net, with a gaping hole in it:
  https://www.zdnet.com/article/for-two-hours-a-large-chunk-of-european-mobile-traffic-was-rerouted-through-china/?utm_source=amerika.org

“For more than two hours on Thursday, June 6, a large chunk of European mobile traffic was rerouted through the infrastructure of China Telecom, China's third-largest telco and internet service provider (ISP). The incident occurred because of a BGP route leak at Swiss data center colocation company Safe Host, which accidentally leaked over 70,000 routes from its internal routing table to the Chinese ISP. The Border Gateway Protocol (BGP), which is used to reroute traffic at the ISP level, has been known to be problematic to work with, and BGP leaks happen all the time. However, there are safeguards and safety procedures that providers usually set up to prevent BGP route leaks from influencing each other's networks. But instead of ignoring the BGP leak, China Telecom re-announced Safe Host's routes as its own, and by doing so, interposed itself as one of the shortest ways to reach Safe Host's network and other nearby European telcos and ISPs.

MOBILE OPERATORS IN FRANCE, HOLLAND, SWITZERLAND AFFECTED
For the subsequent hours, until China Telecom operators realized what they have done, traffic meant for many European mobile networks was rerouted through China Telecom's network. "Some of the most impacted European networks included Swisscom (AS3303) of Switzerland, KPN (AS1130) of Holland, and Bouygues Telecom (AS5410) and Numericable-SFR (AS21502) of France," said Doug Madory, Director of Oracle's Internet Analysis division (formerly Dyn). "Often routing incidents like this only last for a few minutes, but in this case many of the leaked routes in this incident were in circulation for over two hours," Madory added. For the users on the affected mobile network, this manifested as slow connections or the inability to connect to some servers.”

     It would have been just too bad if China had decided to pull the plug at exactly that moment. Lights out for a time, and maybe some restoration of sanity, perhaps. Or simply economic chaos? Given  the internet bannings, it would be poetic justice if China did pull the plug, not that I want this of course, or are ordering Emperor Xi Jinping to do it, just observing the workings from my fox hole.