I don’t think think anyone here would be surprised to find out that both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton have secret, evil, nefarious plans to shut down the internet for various reasons, many of them involving Putin. There are websites that go into excruciating detail on this, trust me.
Also, you know, Skynet could evolve. We’ll need to stop that shit in time if it ever happens, right?
Regardless, is there a way the US government can actually shut down the internet? Or is the knowledge of how to connect computers too widespread to be suppressed?
Cutting the internet off from the rest of the world would be simple. There are actually only a very few locations, less than 10, where the United States’ traffic egresses the nation. Stopping it internally would be more difficult.
Alas, that doesn’t shut down the Internet any more than putting a 9mm through your own brain destroys the universe.
The US can disconnect itself from the Internet (theoretically)*. The US might conceivably be able to attack and knock Internet infrastructure offline in other countries, assuming they haven’t found and fixed the software vulnerabilities that might exist. But that would be temporary.
Unless the grounds have been already secretly laid, it can’t happen.
I doubt we have a legal or even formal national defense mechanism to bust into network operations centers and force them to disconnect. The US’s participation in the Internet is largely in private corporate hands, and as far as I know they don’t take orders from the White House.
At one point I believe the US controlled all the root name servers required for DNS to work - mucking with those wouldn’t make the internet impossible to use, but it would make it very difficult to look things up.
I believe the US relented and now those name servers are controlled by some extra-national entities like IANA or ICANN
A huge percentage (I seen figures from 90 to 99%) of international internet traffic travels through underwater cables, many of which land on American shores. By some estimates, 70% of the world’s internet trafficstill passes through Loudoun County, Virginia, due to the very high concentration of data centers there.
It depends what you mean by shut down the internet:
The government could easily shut down the internet within the US. There’s maybe a dozen or so key connection points. Turn those off and the internet as we know it starts working.
If they tried to do it world wide they could cause massive disruptions but the system would recover. From a software perspective, the DNS system, which translates urls like straightdope.com to IP addresses, is vulnerable. It relies on trusting peer DNS servers to propagate updates. The US controls enough DNS servers to cause havoc in the system. Ultimately, other ISPs outside the US would start to ignore US servers and recover.
From a hardware perspective, the US is an integral part of the network. If the US government stopped traffic it would have a large world wide impact. The rest of the world could lay new cables to bypass the US but it would take some time.
Would shutting down the internet have an effect on cell phones and their applications? Obviously the browser app that brings me the SDMB will be affected, but how about my CVS app? Or Soundcloud? Or even my ability to make cell phone calls - how could that be “stopped”?
A huge majority of American internet users go through an ISP that is regulated. The government could force them all to discontinue transmission to subscribers, by a simple executive order no more complicated or judicially problematic than the one that broke up Bell Telephone in 1982…
It’s true there was a decree in 1982, but it was a consent decree. And it began with a Justice Department Antitrust lawsuit begun in 1974. So it didn’t happen overnight or without negotiation.
But, even if that were effective, it would be effective only to deny Americans access to the internet, surely? That’s not the same thing as “shutting down the internet”.
My first thought would be a combination of viruses, worms and hacks. But this being the government I expect that have much better methods that would prove about as effective as their War On Drugs.
Past a certain point in the telecom network world, it’s all TCP/IP traffic- voice just gets packetized and sent like everything else.
But that’s just voice; the rest of it is ALL TCP/IP. I suppose it’s possible if the internet were shut down, that you might be able to reach sites and resources that were on your own provider’s network without going outside, but that would probably be a very small subset of what’s available.
My first thought would be a combination of tanks, bombs, and troops.
Just send an armed brigade to the key data centers of the backbone carriers and I really doubt that the technicians inside will fight to protect the data centers, even if they are all CCW holders. But in the highly unlikely event they resist, then bomb the place.
That will easily reduce the internet in the United States to just very local connectivity.
Back during the '92 Gulf War Iraq had a commercial-grade packet switching network for their Command and Control. The Air Force was tasked with taking it out and it estimated it would take 12 hours. Instead it took 3 days. It would take it longer than you think. It’s the whole reason it was invented in the first place.
Define “shutting down”. It would be tantamount to shutting it down.
As an analogy, think of the government “shutting down” radio in the 1930s. All legally licensed radio stations would have gone off the air, but there would still be radio bootleggers broadcasting illicitly, and people tuning in stations from Canada and Mexico.
People with an interest in preserving a system that had been banned would just find workarounds and operate underground, as they did during Prohibition.
The US government has not yet shut down slavery, nor polygamy, nor whaling. They still exist in the world. All the US government can do is diminish widespread use out in the open in areas where the US has jurisdiction, or coerce other national entities to do the same…
I’m not sure how functional it would be, given what percentage of the internet traffic either passes through the U.S. on its way from one country to another or lands at a data center in the U.S. Certainly the internet would still be up in most places, but bandwidth restrictions, for example, might leave it barely usable in big chunks of the world.
The magic of routing algorithms: all providers dependent on those no-longer-available US centers would find alternate peering arrangements. And by “finding”, I don’t mean human beings getting on the phone and talking to people they’ve never talked to before. I mean the routers themselves doing the computer equivalent of a little shrug and moving down on a pre-existing list of alternate routes for everyone else in the universe.
The Internet is full of automated "plan B"s. The world’s connectivity would miss US-premise networks for approximately 10 seconds.
