Yes, quite. This is a very silly article which ignores a lot of the real history in favour of a cutesy top up of early 1990s nostalgia - which was a good 20-30 years after the events that really matter.
Saying "The Internet isn't ARPANET" is ridiculous. Of course it isn't. ARPANET was an academic research project with a mix of defence and open R&D requirements. The Internet is a collection of extra layers of commercial development on top of some of that R&D.
Academic research projects are rarely hardened because the point of the project is to investigate possibilities, not to spend hundreds of billions building a physically bomb-proof network that's useless because the core tech doesn't work.
When the Berlin Wall came down the goals changed, but the core concept of distributed scalable robustness is still very much there today. Of course now we have too many choke points, so it's not as robust as it could be. But if someone cuts a cable packets will still find a longer, slower way around as long as the bandwidth is there.
Saying "The Internet isn't ARPANET" is ridiculous. Of course it isn't. ARPANET was an academic research project with a mix of defence and open R&D requirements. The Internet is a collection of extra layers of commercial development on top of some of that R&D.
Academic research projects are rarely hardened because the point of the project is to investigate possibilities, not to spend hundreds of billions building a physically bomb-proof network that's useless because the core tech doesn't work.
When the Berlin Wall came down the goals changed, but the core concept of distributed scalable robustness is still very much there today. Of course now we have too many choke points, so it's not as robust as it could be. But if someone cuts a cable packets will still find a longer, slower way around as long as the bandwidth is there.