What three operational forms does Tier 2 fragility take?

A subsidiary question under Q-0002. Q-0029 documented the Tier 2 ceiling; Q-0030 specifies the failure forms that even successful Tier 2 architectures are exposed to.

The answer is C-0028. The cases that bracket Tier 2's structural fragility — GISAID, DPN, MetaArchive — illustrate three distinct failure modes:

• Adversarial governance. GISAID became the world's primary platform for COVID-19 genomic surveillance (16.5M sequences from 195+ countries). Single-founder governance turned adversarial in 2023, suspending researcher accounts after critical publications and terminating data feeds to Nextstrain/Outbreak.info/CoV-Spectrum in 2025. Single-organization centralization within Tier 2 produces vulnerability identical in form to Tier 1.
• Coordinator dissolution. Digital Preservation Network spent $7M as a coordinator across five federated nodes. When DPN dissolved in 2018, the cross-node integrity contract — fixity audits, succession guarantees, consortium-level provenance — dissolved with the coordinator. Members had to renegotiate preservation node-by-node.
• Silent operational failure. MetaArchive's 2025 sunset audit discovered automated LOCKSS polling had not been replicating content as advertised. Recovery required collapsing the distributed architecture entirely — manually consolidating every member's content onto a Stanford audit node. By Educopia's own statement, "it was not possible to secure a permanent archival home for all of MetaArchive's materials within the sunset time frame."

Tier 2 redundancy is contingent on the consortium operating correctly, with no independent verification path available to the institutions that depend on it.