Beyond infrastructure: Internet ecosystem resilience and the public good

Telecommunications networks have become one of modern society's critical infrastructures (CIs): things required for everyday life and without which widespread disruption can be expected. Historically, the responsibility for ensuring the resilience of their own infrastructures has lain with the individual network operators. However, the complex ways in which economic and social systems now depend crucially on the efficient functioning of an internet system comprised of multiple different operators across the three internet layers creates an additional value of network resilience that will not be adequately captured in the incentives facing any single operator alone. In these circumstances, society benefits from some collective co-ordination to address the externalities.