problem of the Internet

lack of quanitified threats to infrastructure: 
no rigorous study exists of root causes of Internet performance problems/outages
    anecdotal survey (courtesy sean donelan nanog post):
                 1. network engineers (what's this command do?)
                 2. power failures (what's this switch do?)
                 3. cable cuts (backhoes, enough said)
                 4. hardware failures (what's that smell?)             
                 5. congestion (more bandwidth! Captain, I'm giving you all she's got!)
                 6. attacks (malicious, you know who you are)
                 7. software bugs (your call is very important to us....)

   "knowing what we don't know" offers little comfort

this one mostly out of scope for sysadmins and researchers
fcc will have to get involved