The fragile Internet is a threat to the economy. Regulators could treat Facebook, others like banks

tech.hindustantimes.com:

It has been a rough few months for the internet. 

In June, Fastly Inc.’s content-delivery network failure forced some of the world’s biggest e-commerce and media websites offline. Later, there were massive data breaches at T-Mobile US Inc. and Amazon.com Inc.’s Twitch streaming service. And last week, Facebook Inc.’s main social network, Instagram and WhatsApp were down for about six hours. Then on Friday, it happened again — albeit more briefly.

All the incidents had a common corporate response. It goes something like this: We are sorry, it was an unintentional configuration error, we’ll do better next time! After Facebook’s outage, the engineering director at security software firm Cloudflare Inc. called it a reminder about the fragile nature of internet, where millions of interconnected systems are dependent on each other to make it work.

There was a time in the early days of the web when these excuses would be acceptable. But the internet, and many of these companies, now constitute the backbone of the modern economy. Billions of consumers and millions of small businesses rely on Facebook’s communication tools for daily living. If the web is held together by rubber bands and toothpicks, it’s clear that the U.S. needs to take urgent action to mitigate those vulnerabilities. 

What can be done? First, we should hold companies accountable when they fail to implement proper safeguards and security policies. The sheer frequency of the problems shows the industry, in aggregate, doesn’t take the issue seriously. Companies don’t prioritize the problem or invest enough to fix it. That’s why it’s important to make negligence much more painful by raising the size of financial penalties and increasing the liabilities for management