Haydn Rees

Eindhoven

Technical Analyst

I was in Cheltenham last summer during the floods - a once in a hundred year flood, followed three weeks later by a second once in a hundred year flood.

The water went out for about 10 days. The plans to evacuate 160,000 people from Gloucestershire if the power went out were at an extremely advanced stage, because if you don't have water and power utilities, you aren't living in a house, you're living in a cave.

It doesn't take a huge amount of imagination to figure out which systems to take down, and in what order to put us back into the Stone Age. It took a few hundred fuel tanker drivers to not show up to work for ten days to be within 48 hours of bringing the UK to it's knees.

The Internet is an enabling technology like no other, allowing us to solve problems which we had to deal with every day once, so that they stay solved. We now need to take a long hard look at how much value we get from the Internet, and calculate how much it is worth to us to keep it running as we want it to.