Shutting down the internets

[raino]

Also, an unrelated thing, just in case someone might know: are there servers vital to the functioning to internet that solely reside in the USA? Or is everything distributed globally? I thought some naming/isp servers were only in the US, but now that I researched, it seems this hasn't been the case since 90's.
I'm not planning to ruin the internet, trust me, I just need this for a story I'm writing. I need the internet to crash in it, which could maybe happen if USA seceded from the rest of the world and cut all electronic contact, and all computer technology from US self-destructed, but I'm not sure if it's theoretically possible to shut down the internet anymore.

Comments

[used_songs]

My gut tells me no. I went looking for sources for you:

https://www.quora.com/Could-a-rogue-government-in-the-US-disrupt-the-Internet-globally

"There was a time, of course, in the 1990s when it seemed as if Microsoft ran the Internet, when the company got into antitrust trouble with the United States Justice Department. But that was business control — to an extent. It was never technical control.

In 1993, John Gilmore, a freedom-of-speech activist and one of the founders of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, was quoted as saying, “The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.”

He was referring to the basic design of a computer network that was intended to have no central control and no single point of failure. There is no one plug to pull or server to block. That decentralized structure has created headaches for anyone trying to control communications in cyberspace." (quoted because paywall)
https://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/12/08/why-donald-trumps-call-to-close-up-the-internet-is-science-fiction/?_r=0


https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/could-internet-ever-be-destroyed/

[raino]

Wow, thanks! So it seems that even if all but two of the 13 root servers are in name US entities, they are cloned worldwide and are thereby in practice un-disruptible. Which is good news for reality but bad news for my story :D
I suppose cutting US out of the internet would make the rest pretty congested, but slower and slightly more unreliable connections are not aesthetically as pleasing as a huge boom-bang-crush.
(Interestingly, I did not run into a paywall for the NYTimes blog. It's free for non-US readers?)

[jesse_the_k]

The NYTimes has been much more lenient lately about its paywall -- I haven't received a "0 articles left" message in several month. It's probably gremlins, but a little bit of me hopes its a contribution to "truth in news."

not at all an expert here

[redbird]

The internet architecture has been decentralized for safety since before most of us knew there was such a thing: back in ARPAnet days, the department of defense wanted a network that could survive a nuclear attack.

There might be some vulnerability in some kinds of relatively low-level hardware: e.g., if your characters could find a way to destroy all the routers from a particular large company, that might bring the Internet down temporarily. "Temporarily" because people would be working hard to patch in other devices that didn't have the vulnerability in question, and get their sites connected again at least partially.

Re: not at all an expert here

[raino]

Oh, I remember visiting my mom's workplace as a kid, she organized specialized courses on information technology, and there was a poster about lecture on ARPAnet. My first touch with internet :D I remember it specifically, because it had a drawing of dice (arpa(kuutio) - Finnish for dice).

I'll look into cutting out routers from a couple of big companies, I think it could work in the context of the story. Thanks for the idea!

Re: not at all an expert here

[raino]

And after reading the news about CIA slipping some kind of spy backdoors in many companies' routers, I think I'm inspired to write someone misusing firmware in biggest companies' products. Something that no-one thought to use like that, all of them activated at the same time.

[smile_n_cuddle]

Such an interesting scenario! I'm reading the responses :)