All political, ethical, and business interest issues aside. My understanding is that the Internet is very difficult to regulate but places like China and North Korea can achieve it by bottlenecking all traffic through a very limited number of access points. But even in those places it’s not too hard to get around the limitations (again, as I understand it - I really don’t know that much about the finer points of how Internet traffic gets routed).
So let’s say that tomorrow Congress decided that pineapple-related content on the Internet was becoming a public nuisance and they passed a law banning all online content on pineapples and pineapple-related activities in the U.S.
Now to try to enforce that against the end users would be ridiculous, but the ISPs seem like a bottleneck that they could go after. If all ISPs had to comply with the law by blocking content to their users, how would one get around that? Can I get Internet from the same “source” that my current ISP is getting it from? What would be the difficulties from a strictly technical standpoint in implementing this new law?
Establish an encrypted VPN tunnel to an endpoint outside the United States, and use it to find all the sweet-ass pineapple porn your heart desires. Your ISP can’t filter traffic that it can’t read. They could try to shut down your VPN, in which case you can just cloak it inside some other innocuous-looking protocol. They could decide to drop packets heading for known VPN endpoints, in which case you could just switch to a new one. You could use automatic randomizing mutual proxy services like Tor, too.
The internet is not one single entity or organization just like any number of bans good luck forcing everyone to give up their marijuana, 15 shot magazines, liquor, whatever.
Outfits would start hosting their own search engines that would point you at your pinapply goodness even if the big boys complied.
After all we can buy medicines and eyeglasses without prescription, buy cigarettes without paying proper state taxes, and buy countless goods with minimal if any sales tax.
Its kind of like trying to regulate people talking to each other. If you can’t talk in public, you’ll find a way to do it in private. People will develop code language, just like on the internets. So if it became important enough to every government on earth, they’d lock down all hard access so there is nowhere to connect to wireless communication, and filter everything for every reference to pineapples they can find (pretty tough with encrypted pineapples). And they still won’t be able to stop the People’s Pineapple Front from communicating and running their recruitment and fund raising activity on the net.
The really short answer lies in two concepts: steganography and fast transmission and processing of digital data. There is also encryption, but that isn’t a particular characteristic of the internet. Once you have your encrypted picture of a pineapple, then what makes it impossible to prevent you sending it to someone else over the internet is:
1/ Steganography which prevents anyone from knowing that you are even sending a coded message in the first place. The internet is the perfect place for use of steganography because it is used for sending vast volumes of non-pineapple related data within which to hide the encoded data.
2/ Fast transmission and processing of digital data which means that the millions upon millions of calculations required to encode pineapple data and hide it an innocuous picture of your dog, then transmit it, then unhide it and unencode it at the other end can be done so fast that it is virtually transparent to the end user.
A second appropriate bottleneck would be the international cable and satellite links: there are a very limited number of them. That won’t do much for internal traffic, of course.
Doesn’t matter who the bottleneck is - the ISPs can’t keep track of what’s going through their wires anyways. There’s so much data being sent through the internet at any given time that there just isn’t enough processing power in the world to scan it in real-time (and that’s leaving out that computers pretty much suck at identifying content), so your options are either neuter the internet to make it slow enough to monitor (which means no graphics, no real-time links, basically bulletin board level), or doing random tests and fining ISPs for every pineapple mention. Except, since your tests are being done after the fact, all you’re doing is punishing the ISPs for something they can’t stop.
Right into a pineapple daiquiri, those sickos! Every God-fearing American knows that the only fruit allowed in these is lime! Next they’ll be making martini out of things besides gin and vermouth!
In fact, the regular post (or regular in-person conversation) is probably a good comparison. Can the government prevent all pineapple-related letters being sent and received? Not purely technically, because there are so many letters. They can make it illegal, and use computers to automatically open and scan letters for keywords, but people have a high chance of getting away with it most of the time if they talk obliquely.
The way the government actually controls this is to make it completely verboten, such that people are scared to even consider it, knowing that even only one or two of their letters are caught, they’ll be off to prison for ten years.
It also depends how willing the government are to accept this extreme censorship. If you’re trying to restrict a tiny fraction of traffic, it’s quite difficult, because people can use all sorts of ways of disguising or encrypting it. If you’re willing to make non-plain-text content illegal itself then you can exert a much much greater degree of control.
The other thing about the Internet is that it was designed from the ground up to be as decentralized as possible. It had its start as a Department of Defense project, and they wanted it to keep running even if the key computers all got nuked. Any place you could put your filters in would also be a place where, if it failed, the Internet would go down, so it was designed not to have places like that.
The Internet isn’t some single cohesive “thing.” As the name implies, it is an internet–a network of networks. There are some major connection points where the big boys plug in to get their high-bandwidth connections, but most ISPs are connected in a big net.
If I buy a leased line from my local phone company, all I have to do is put in some modems (or wireless routers, or fiber lines, or…) and sell a connection to you, and bam: I’m an ISP.
You could break the lines between two of those major connection points, and it wouldn’t cut off anybody’s access. It would just force data to be routed around the break via other routes.
And, as someone else pointed out, the routers and switches that handle the high-volume traffic are working at capacity just to read the routing information on the data packets and shoot them out the other end. If you tried to reprogram those devices to actually analyze those packets, they would slow to a crawl and start dropping connections.
If the U.S. government tried to remove certain kinds of information from the Internet, they’d have to find every single line that crosses the oceans, or crosses into Canada and Mexico. They’d have to cut off satellite linkages and microwave linkages that go outside the country. And then, once they’d prevented that information from coming into the country, they’d have to chase down every single server in the U.S., ranging from the big server farms at Google to the ten-year-old computer sitting in some dude’s basement that’s connected by phone line.
A big reason it’s technically hard to censor the Internet is the endless mutability of information: Any device that can send a signal can send Internet traffic. ALOHAnet was a computer network in Hawaii built around amateur radios; the original Ethernet was built up from coaxial cables, like what (analog) cable TV uses; hams using packet radio technology can bounce network traffic off the damned Moon if the conditions are right. All you need is a somewhat-reliable way of getting any form of information from point A to point B and you can develop encoding schemes to run the Internet on that.
What is the Internet? Fundamentally, it’s data being shipped around in IP packets. What’s an IP packet? A chunk of data with a standard label on it, the IP header, with routing information: A ‘from’ address, a ‘to’ address, and some other data. Any technology that can send any information at all can send information packaged in that manner, and so it can be part of the Internet. Therefore, to stop the Internet, one would need to stop all communications, regardless of the technology used.
(Yes, certain uses of the Internet could be stopped with less draconian measures. Streaming video, for example, needs some pretty specialized equipment that could be banned pretty effectively. Email, OTOH, would be very difficult to ban effectively.)
As mentioned, it is essentially impossible to put a stop to 100% of some content being available on the internet. However, making the barrier difficult enough can have a chilling effect in which the content is effectively reduced, almost by momentum – particularly for user-generated content.
For example, if you put up a big enough hurdle for people to access the SDMB, even though it is still technically possible to work around it, you’ll lose enough of the casual users that the SDMB loses value/utility because there’s not enough people here.
The fight against internet piracy goes the same way. It’s not really possible to prevent the distribution of pirated content. However, if you make it just difficult enough that only the small minority of “connected” people remain, it loses steam.
There’s even an established protocol for sending Internet traffic via carrier pigeon. Granted, the protocol was released on April Fool’s Day, but it’s still a perfectly valid and viable protocol.
And maybe ARPAnet wasn’t specifically intended to survive nukes, but it was designed to be robust against node failure of whatever cause.
Thanks for the explanation - so is this essentially the case in China? Because as I understand it that’s exactly what they do. They (at least try to) contain all traffic to going through just a few access points. In a country of a billion people that must be unbearably slow.