Internet fallout from the crashing market?
Monday, October 06, 2008 by Dave Winer.
The stock market continues to crash, down almost 500 points today, below 10K for the first time in four years. I'm taking a bath, but not as bad as some, since I sold all my stocks in January and have been getting back in very very gradually. 
However, I'm concerned about the health of some of the Internet companies I depend on. It doesn't take many failures for the Internet that we depend on to start going dark. What if for example your domain registrar were to go under, or the company hosting your DNS, or your colo facility? There are a lot of points of failure that in normal times could be easily replaced to keep your web presence up. But it's time to start thinking about how that might work. And who you can trust.
I assume we can trust Google and Microsoft to stay on the air? eBay? Amazon? What about TechCrunch? Scripting News? :-(
I'm not just starting to think about this, but I haven't wanted to say anything unless I was fairly sure that it was going to become a prolonged thing. It's looking more like that every day. I guess the future is starting and it's got different rules from the recent past.
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Dave Winer, 53, pioneered the development of weblogs, syndication (RSS), podcasting, outlining, and web content management software; former contributing editor at Wired Magazine, research fellow at Harvard Law School, entrepreneur, and investor in web media companies. A native New Yorker, he received a Master's in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin, a Bachelor's in Mathematics from Tulane University and currently lives in Berkeley, California.
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