This workstream maps where critical services in the South Pacific are actually hosted, and what happens when the paths to those services break. We classify domains by disaster-scenario priority - emergency services, transport, government, finance, media, and utilities - and identify hidden dependencies on CDNs, DNS providers, cloud hosting, and offshore infrastructure.
The first challenge is classifying what a critical or emergency service is. While it might be easy for some cases (police, emergency responders, civil defense), it becomes more difficult when you expand the scope outside of this small scope. News sites are critical for sharing information during an emergency, where it becomes harder is determining if a news site is critical for the local area. The BBC is a well regarded news outlet, however it is unlikely to have evacuation or shelter information for locals in Tonga during an emergency. Similar to international stock markets or investment firms might not be considered critical compared to local banks, or financial institutes that have a local presence that local residents are more likely to consult for emergency relief.
Generally any website related to the local government, or embassies in the area are considered critical. Other services that are also included are local supermarkets, hardware stores, schools and community centers.
The central question is whether these services can still function if international connectivity is lost. A domain that looks local often is not. A NZ emergency management site might resolve to a NZ server with the www prefix, but the bare domain points to Sydney. Another example would be a civil defence shelter map being hosted in the United States. When the cable goes, the information people need during an emergency goes with it.
Our belief is that critical services used in an emergency should not be hosted out of the country. By having locally hosted content, you significantly reduce the impact of submarine cable cuts and outages outside your control.
www prefix, but the bare domain points to Sydney. Different server, different country.During the classification of domains we discovered an interesting trend in the Internet cultures of the South Pacific. In particular, we found that there are three distinct Internet cultures.
This is largely affiliated with American Samoa. As it is a US territory, we often find websites are either specifically for American Samoa or they will use services commonly used in the US mainland. This is especially true for websites related to the navy, banking and government. Although, American Samoa does have a local site for its own government.
However, there is still a large influence of Australia and New Zealand culture with multiple businesses having local representation in American Samoa.
Australia and New Zealand definitely has the largest influence in the region. A lot of the banks, phone providers, news sites, etc have a strong overlap to those that are provided in Australia/New Zealand. This is hardly surprising as a large population of people with Pacific heritage live in these countries, (around 450,000+ in New Zealand and 300,000+ in Australia) often with family still in their home country.
Hardly surprising that there is a strong influence of French Internet culture in the French territories in the South Pacific. For the areas that we looked at, this was Wallis and Futuna, New Caledonia and Vanuatu. The interesting part about these countries are that there was little to no crossover with their Internet culture compared to the rest of the South Pacific region. It is quite common to websites, banking providers, identity manager all being hosted in France. The worst offender for this is the official government website for Wallis and Futuna (www.wallis-et-futuna.gouv.fr), is hosted on the other side of the world in France.