What we need is a plan B … independent of the Internet. [It] doesn't necessarily have to have the performance of the Internet, but the police department has to be able to call up the fire department.

Hillis is arguing for resilience and redundancy in civic communications: society has become so dependent on the Internet that a major outage—whether from technical failure, cyberattack, or disaster—could cripple basic coordination among emergency services. By calling for a “plan B” that is independent of the Internet and need not match its speed or capacity, he emphasizes that reliability and survivability matter more than performance for critical infrastructure. The example of police needing to reach the fire department underscores interagency interoperability as a minimum requirement. The quote reflects a broader systems-engineering mindset: complex networks should have fallback modes that preserve essential functions when the primary system fails.