Such a thing would be impossible to predict the ramifications of, because it would mean we were living in a world run on magic. It’s like asking a physics question about what effect an infinitely rigid material would have given that the speed of sound in such a material would be infinite. Garbage In, Garbage Out.
In particular, imagining a world where the Internet no longer works but phones still do is especially self-contradictory, since modern long-haul phone networks not only use the same hardware as the Internet, they use the same networking technology: Networking standards such as T1, T3, OC-768, and ATM (Asynchronous Transfer Mode, in this context) are all designed to be used for both telephony and data traffic at the same time.
Similarly, both radio and television signals are transmitted over networks that could (and possibly do) carry Internet traffic just as easily; I think radio stations like to use ISDN, which is eminently capable of carrying data.
And on the software side, there’s nothing special about implementing a networking protocol compared to implementing a disk drive protocol or a USB port protocol. In every instance, the kernel’s reading data from the hardware, parsing data, handing data off to an application, reading data from an application, encapsulating data as per the protocol, and writing data out to the hardware. Even higher-level stuff, like networking applications, aren’t all that special; I’ve written web servers, for example, and a simple (but functional!) web server is a lot simpler than any text editor you’d actually want to use.
So you’re not going to get good answers to this, and you might as well know why.
One suspects that a very large part of the bandwidth chewed up on the Internet is not exactly mission critical to the operation of the world’s economies. So, if we were to posit that the infrastructure that underpins the current Internet were to be destroyed somehow, it would not take long to get to a point where we could operate satisfactory, even if were are not satisfying the bit-torrenters pirating movies. For a bit of fun, try the Lynx web browser, to see how much you could actually get away with in term of reduced bandwidth.
For all useful purposes the Internet is carried on fibre now. One could indeed imagine a conflict where undersea fibres were regularly cut, and not jut cut, but physically removed. Cuts are repaired pretty quickly, even in very deep water, but it takes a long time to lay a new cable end to end, so in a world where all the major fibre cable links were destroyed one could imagine that it could take a few years to replace them all, and a good fraction of a year to get even one new one in place. Especially for the trans-pacific runs. However the Internet existed for quite some time when a lot of traffic went via satellite. Certianly the 80’s saw Oz connected to the US via a satellite link. Pre web days, and not exactly a lot of users, but it worked. Modern satellites can carry quite a bit of bandwidth, so getting an international Internet in the face of no undersea fibre working in a hurry would be quite feasible with existing satellites. Still vastly less bandwidth than we enjoy right now, but easily enough to satisfy the critical needs and many less critical ones. Indeed given the number of more isolated people using satellite internet right now there is a lot of capacity, albeit mostly not set up to bridge the international divides.
Even then we are only dividing the Internet into a lot of smaller entities. Coastal countries tend to be linked by undersea fibre, and obviously islands. A lot of Asia depends upon undersea links, but inside the EU and inside the US, you are not going to see much problem.
So you need a scenario where we lose all our undersea fibre and wipe out our geostationary orbit comsats. That sounds like a job for Ernst Stavro Blofeld to me. A mix of submarines and spacecraft cruising about causing mayhem.
What’s amazing is that most people were not using the Internet well into the 1990s. Many people even fewer than 10 years ago did nothing online! Yet now we can’t imagine life without it.
I think the main threat to the Internet is the possibility we might someday no longer be able to produce the microchips that make the Internet possible. Or certain countries might have a monopoly on them. If it’s no longer possible to produce chips, then the Internet will gradually rot away as people’s computers stop working.
The main threat to the Internet is the few backbone providers that own most of the hardware. If the US (or someone similarly powerful) persuaded them, they could just shut down all the hardware running the internet and destroy it. I don’t see this as very likely.
But much likelier is that an organization (like the US govt) persuades them to implement censorship and surveillance such that the Internet is less useful for the purpose of free speech and communications.
Both of these problems would be routed around eventually, but much chaos and hardship would be the interim effect.
Also, ARPAnet may not have been built to survive a nuclear war, but the technological concept underlying the Internet was: Packet switching.
Computers don’t really stop working though. It’s just the pace of progress that makes old hardware obsolete. No progress = no obsolescence. If we can keep the power supplies and cooling systems running (and the hard drives to store our data on), our CPUs could presumably last for a very long time.
I know that. I was merely giving my take on what I thought the OP was asking.
Essentially the question relates to how much of the world we live in is dependent on this nebulous communications structure that we offhandedly call the internet.
I was merely proposing a (highly unrealistic) mechanism whereby the net may be down but all of the other trappings of day to day life still exist.
And that’s ultimately the problem: The Internet isn’t a thing, it’s an activity. The Internet is, at base, a specific way to communicate data between different kinds of networks without needing (much) manual intervention at the network boundaries, as a result making those network boundaries seem to disappear most of the time. It has, in modern times, become the method, and the term, for pretty much everything we do as regards moving computer-readable data long distances. It wasn’t fated to happen, and it had to defeat the OSI Model and Protocol Suite in order to get where it is today, but that’s where it stands now.
So the question the OP’s really asking is what would happen if somehow, magically, the people of the world suddenly forgot how to Internet. And the answer to “Magic?” is always and only “More Magic!”
no–the internet is a thing. It’s very much like the electric grid. And we all know what happens when the electricity stops working.
I don’t see the OP as asking about magic. He’s asking a legitimate question, similar to asking what would happen in the case of a power blackout. (although he proposes a pretty extreme case).
It’s true that the OP’s extreme case is unlikely to happen. Like the electric grid, the internet has a lot of backup and redundancy. But it’s also more vulnerable to viruses, and to damaged cables, which have in the past disconnected entire countries and continents-- but only for a short time.
So the problem seems managable for now. But it’s still a problem.
No. Not in the slightest. The Internet is a set of standards and implementations, not hardware. It’s knowledge, not any specific piece of infrastructure. Specific pieces of infrastructure are more important than others, in a practical sense, but they could all be taken down and replaced and the Internet would not change one iota after the initial hair-on-fire period.
Also, no. The answer to “What happens if a specific piece of hardware goes out?” is “We replace the hardware.” We know this. The answer to “What happens if some piece of software is found to be unusably insecure?” is also “We fix it.” We also know this. None of those questions are interesting, and that’s OK, because they weren’t the ones being asked.
The OP was asking something more along the lines of “What happens if we lose the ability to generate electricity?” and the answer to that is “More magic!”
As an addenda to my above post: The Internet has always evolved over time, as our knowledge grows and what we demand of large-scale networking changes. That happens by changing standards, because standards are primary, and hardware and software can be slotted in and out at will because they all adhere to the same standards. That’s the Open Systems philosophy, which the Internet standards suite has always been based on at its core level.
So this Plan B isn’t a Plan B to the Internet. It’s a Plan B for evolving the Internet, in response to a different security environment. But that is, really, nothing new. The Morris Worm was the first salvo in that battle, and it’s been raging ever since.
Derleth, you are obviously more knowledgeable than I am on this matter and I am not going to seriously argue with what you are saying.
But I will encourage you to take a look at the TED talk I linked to. Hillis refers to the internet as a thing rather than a process. He talks about how integrated it is in our lives in ways that we do not really expect. He lists a few examples where the system came under stress due to vulnerabilities that were built in at its inception. And he makes a case for establishing systems of backup using separate protocols so that the internet itself is protected from the unexpected – which may be events not as dramatic as meteors but may have unforeseen consequences.
I don’t have an axe to grind here and I am not an expert. I really only popped in for a look.
The question in my mind is to clarify exactly the extent of communications technology commonly dubbed as “the internet” on our every day lives.
Hillis’ statements about pumping gas and grounding aircraft due to system bugs caught my interest. These are the things I was wondering about.
Danny is a pretty interesting guy. (I actually have quite a bit of historical hardware he was responsible for in my museum collection.) He makes a couple of interesting points. He mentions emergent behaviour, which is always interesting to contemplate when systems get big enough, but he also alludes to a possible issue - a form of livelock - where the protocols get into a mess and you can’t get rid of the problem without essentially restarting everything to get rid of the errant information that causes the mess. Whilst it is unlikely, it isn’t beyond the bounds of possibility that there are complex behaviour patterns that could emerge on the internet that behave like this. Killing them off could be hard - and may require taking systems off the network - applying protocol fixes to the software and hoping that you can rebuild a working network. Something like that might cause significant outages that last weeks. What makes it hard is that the behaviour might not actually be in error - it may simply be a natural function of a correct implementation of the protocols.
This brings to mind a bit of a dark secret about much of the protocol set. In reality a lot is no where near as well tested and sorted out as we might hope. The base level stuff is - but there are many layered protocols in use that have had vastly less effort spent on them. It is amusing to note that many protocols are specified as RFCs - Request For Comment documents. The rule is that protocols are considered good if there are two separately coded implementations that operate correctly and can interoperate. There have been some hard questions asked about some protocols that didn’t seem to fully meet even this low level of quality. In reality I suspect many of the layered protocols have lots of holes in their behaviour. A concerted effort might find all sorts of evil ways to get some protocols to cause problems. There is little to no glory in finding problems here, the glory goes to those who develop new ideas. Unless you have an interest in exploiting the holes.
One thing that Danny didn’t seem to acknowledge. There are other inter-networking protocols that both exist and are in daily use. ATM for one. It is an interesting question right now - all the current effort is to move everything to IP and variants of ethernet, wiping away protocols like ATM. So in this sense Danny is correct - we are moving to a pure IP based network. But we do have a plan B, it is just that we are actively taking it apart.
Without probably; I can verify they do: I had radio-based internet in my flat for several years. The flat’s in the Pyrenees, by the time cable gets there it will be the pieces which have been taken out of the streets of Madrid, the only options were ADSL (a single provider, the rest would not service the area) or radio (which was cheaper due to not adding the landline maintenance and phone number costs to the price of internet service; the internet service itself was the same price).
The service is still available, but the company providing it has been bought by those other guys and they don’t advertise it - you need to ask about it specifically.