"Fuckers!" mumbled the Prime Minister, almost inaudibly.
BlerghFeed were playing hardball, refusing to renew the media deal.
She breathed deeply, closed her eyes and re-grouped.
"What are our options?Everything's on the table."
"We could just let them block the media sites".
"But then the content from the right wing nut job sites does get posted".
"Ugh."
"And we'll be pilloried in the press. We're going to a general election next year. We can't survive more than a 7% swing."
"We could regulate large internet sites, put some local content rules in."
"Didn't work for Amazon or Netflix did it? They just threatened to exit the country."
"Yeah, that'd be more than a 7% swing!"
There were chuckles, easing the tension.
"Perhaps ... "
Thirty pairs of eyes settled on the bespectacled tech analyst.
"Go on, Kim."
Kim rarely spoke. Rarer still in high-stakes emergency meetings.
"So, we know all the CDN IP addresses of their network in Australia, right?"
"Ah, English, Kim".
Kim's face flushed.
"Sorry."
Kim swallowed some cola and continued.
"Content Delivery Networks - CDNs - position the content for these sites closer to the people requesting the content. You know, so they're not hitting servers in America and having to wait an extra second or two for the content to transit the Pacific."
"Be a shame if those CDNs, and just those CDNs, started dropping packets."
"Dropping packets?"
"Being flakey. Being slower. Would take BlerghFeed longer to load".
"And it would just be BlerghFeed, right?"
"Yeah, the CDN servers are isolated. Wouldn't affect other stuff."
"So it wouldn't look like an NBN outage? And the ISPs could blame it on BlerghFeed."
"Absolutely, if we do it properly."
"Won't the CDN companies figure it out? Won't BlerghFeed figure it out?" queried Vani. Whip smart, that Vani.
"We, ah, own a majority share in most of the CDNs now, thanks to the Futures Fund. They should be willing to help."
"Yeah, but still, BlerghFeed will have top notch IP networking people. They'll be able to see patterns of CDN activity that don't match."
"Yeah, good call Vani."
"What about BusyBox?"
"BusyBox?"
"Yeah, sorry, English. BusyBox is what most routers use as their software. The box that the NBN goes into in peoples' homes".
"And ..."
"Sorry." Kim flushed red again.
"So, if we could alter BusyBox to get it to slow down BlerghFeed, and we could do it to all the major routers, it wouldn't look like public internet traffic at all."
"Because there wouldn't be anything different about the traffic in transit, it would get choked at the router."
"Right."
"But, how do we get the ISPs on board to give the routers new firmware?"
"Didn't you hear? There's a massive CVE in BusyBox. They need to patch it."
The Prime Minister, for the first time in days, smiled.
Bruce thumped his keyboard.
"Farking useless."
BlerghFeed kept getting slower and slower these days.
@KathyReid less fictional: a senior minister wanted to fly a bunch of people to/from country X, off the regular routes, on short notice and the tenders all came back at exorbitant prices. Embarrassingly high by government standards. Minister thumps desk, demands the public service turn the screws. A short time later the head of civil aviation appears with a fat binder under their arm and humbly asks the question "which airline?". Minister replied "Y". * opens fat binder to tab marked "Y" and says, "theres quite a few safety breaches here, be a shame if that found it's way into a report". Minister ask for new tender reply and suprisingly "Y" quotes quite a reasonable number.
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