I'm not sure I buy the "fragility" argument. The Internet is remarkably resilient -- the DOD designed it that way. If there's an outage, traffic just goes another way. It's when 2 carriers get in a tiff and start denying service to each other's subscribers that there's a problem.
Now if you're a RoadRunner subscriber (or quite a few of my customers for that matter), that rationale doesn't really mean a whole heck of a lot if you can't get to anything. But it's not really a case of the Internet being frail, but rather 2 ISP's trying to make a point at the expense of their customers (and their customers' customers...).
I just had the cable replaced to my home on Saturday because RR said it wasn't doing the job . . . perhaps they don't even know what was happening in the bowels of the internet.
But at least I have a new cable . . .
"...but rather 2 ISP's trying to make a point at the expense of their customers (and their customers' customers...)."
Yeah it is pretty low. But I think the two companies are NAP's, not ISP's. NAP's are the ones who control parts of the backbone.