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Note that Professor Brewer is a teacher/academic, and CAP is intended for instructional purposes

Teacher, academic, and vice president of infrastructure at Google. He wrote about the CAP implications of Spanner here as well:

https://storage.googleapis.com/pub-tools-public-publication-...

I think you're conflating different things there.

If you built a highly redundant network, and it still partitioned, then the actual problem is that you somehow lost 80% of your lines to the internet at the same time. So your response back needs to be that your HA setup kept things running for a while but it would take actual magic to keep going once just about all the servers are unplugged simultaneously. That's not a problem with CAP, that's a problem with explaining the wrong part of the issue.

>>> "Yeah, when our network partitioned, we couldn't accept purchases in both partitions." Their response will be, "So all that money you spent on HA was really based on a lie?"

"All that money spent on HA was what allowed us to accept purchases -at all-"