The danger is human, not tech. Either bad actors exploit the failure or the masses panic and create an issue. By ‘we’ I meant both Americans and the people of the world. After 9/11 and the start of the pandemic there was an initial period of cooperation and agreement before countries and groups tried to assert an agenda. This period should be long enough to stabilize the Internet failure. DNS isn’t going to be down for a week. AWS, Azure, GCS already reroute to other data centers on their internal network; their issue would be capacity (which means requests would be delayed or more likely prioritized).
The Internet is the main network, but not the only one. We have multiple mobile networks covering the globe, we have satellites including GPS, and multiple transportation guidance systems. Smartphones that can SMS, call on 3G, and use GPS. These connect to the Internet, but are not dependent on it.
There’s a 3 month pipeline of container ships in the ocean. Am I wrong to assume these can continue to navigate uninterrupted without the Internet? It would be a mess at the ports for sure. I assume those is heavily dependent on the Internet.
Import-heavy countries, like islands, would be hardest hit. Less developed areas could be less affected – depending on where their food comes from.
The Guardian article was a lot of FUD. They raised issues and the expert played them down. When the pandemic started, the world completely shut down for a couple of weeks. It went much better than I would have guessed. It’s the one good thing from the pandemic; it showed that humans could cooperate and overcome inertia (for a very short period of time).