Hypothetical Q, if California (or other large section, but CA is wacky enough to try this ;)) wanted to totally split itself off from the rest of the planet, cut all ties, including all communications, what would happen to the internet in each section?
You’d want to look at the NAPs. (Network Access Points.)
Pacific Bell maintains a NAP in San Francisco, which I believe most ISPs in California connect to. Theoretically, that NAP could be disconnected from the internet-at-large, and ISPs from outside California could be denied access to it, so California surfers (heh) would only have access to sites hosted within California, and which would be inaccessable to folks on the outside.
No doubt someone who knows more about networking nuts-and-bolts than I do will be along to elaborate presently.
Cut off ALL communication? Like… walking across the border to Nevada with a note in your pocket?
Speaking strictly in an internet sense… the internet is designed to be self repairing to an extent. There is no direct point from the sender’s packets to the receiver’s, there are usually thousands of ways and alternate routes to get from pt A to pt B. So if your data packet tried going one way that was closed off, it would simply find another connection to get there.
That said, if you manage to cut off ALL network data points between CA and the rest of the internet, then you’d only be able to use the network to contact servers in the same geographic island. But you’d have to prevent users from using dialup to get to an ISP that is out of state, and keep them from using satellite connections.
The rest of the internet would be unaffected, except it could not communicate with any servers in CA that were cut off.
Brief history lesson, the internet was designed to allow gov’t agencies and universities to communicate all over the country. Once it grew, many gov’t agencies created a new network that is for them only. Can’t be hacked if you can’t even get on the network.
First thing that popped into my head was “Where are the DNS root servers?” If there aren’t any on the newly-isolated network in California, things will get really confused really quick.
DNS servers are the things that let you type “www.straightdope.com” into the browser rather than something hard to remember like http://67.202.59.23 There are thirteen “root” or top-level servers on the planet. Since they control all addressing and naming on the internet, they are very, very, very well-protected, both logically and physically.
Anyway, it turns out that four of them (their rather unimaginative names are B, E, F and L) are in California, so we’d do just fine, as long as we were trying to access other servers in the state. Everything else would simply kick out a 404 error.
If there weren’t any DNS root servers in CA, it would just be a matter of time before human-friendly names stopped working as servers crash or are changed for whatever reason. It would also be impossible for any new names to be introduced.
I thought I read a couple months back that indeed this is happening.
I think there are even now sites that acquire your location, and then determine if you can gain access or not.
I think it was on this board, and it was a premium TV channel’s website… HBO or Showtime.
Depending on your defintions, the internet is the internet because it is so split up.
The Chinese government, Commies that they are, are trying very hard to make their internet a separate island. But instead of a total cutoff, they have nanny filters at the edge. Anyone inside China can only see the places on the internet that the gov’t wants them too. Those filters could be cut off entirely if the Gov’t so chose.
Naturally, it isn’t 100% effective, but they’re trying. And mostly succeeding.