How is so? Will the US President able to shut down Internet worldwide or just in the US? If worldwide, what could Europe, China, India and the rest of the world do to avoid it?
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/03/presidents-v...
For the record, even if every ISP in the US agreed to shut down, no the rest of the world would not be "shut down", except for US-based services going off the air, or to the extent that they house their services on US-based servers.
The origin of the Internet lies exactly in the requirement that it be "self-healing". You can read an early history here:
* As you mentioned, the Prez' authority is (mostly) limited to the US. I say "mostly" because the US has been known to exert economic and even military pressure on other countries that didn't toe the line of US interests. Shutting down the US corner of the Internet would take about 13% of worldwide Internet _users_ offline; in terms of infrastructure and services, I'd wager it would be lots more. Consider that Google, Yahoo, MSN and lots of other globally significant sites are US based.
* Something else to consider: Who runs the DNS root servers? Isn't internic run by a US company? In theory, DNS is redundant; in practice, I think loss of the root servers would kick up a lot of disturbance. AFAIK the Internet would be crippled for most intents and purposes without DNS.
I don't know if the president could shut down the internet or not, but I'd like to see him try. That would be all kinds of crazy fun.
Granted their caches will run stale fairly quickly but they won't be inoperable.
I personally think that creating this capability is a bad idea for two reasons; it weakens the redundancy of the network, and it provides an attractive target for black hat hackers. Any element bent on creating problems would know that the best way to do so would be to figure out how to forge a presidential emergency shutdown order.
If they were really malicious, US based ISPs could cripple the internet by "hijacking" IP addresses that don't belong to them. The internet backbone mostly operates based on trust, if you're part of the backbone you are free to broadcast false routing rules that forward legitimate traffic to a black hole. Still I don't think this would last very long, it's just a matter of time before other ISPs purge the bad rules and get routing working again.
However, I'd bet dollars to donuts that there exists a highly classified plan to shutdown the majority of the Internet if truly necessary for an extraordinary emergency. The DoD make plans for everything they might need to handle and they get $500+ billion a year carte blanche. If you had 100 cruise missiles, a dozen nuclear subs, thousands of special forces teams and around 50 spy satellites, how hard would it be to shatter the Internet into countless disconnected networks?
This is a fun and practical math problem in optimization and graph theory: What's the minimal number of cut undersea cables, missiled satellites, bombed microwave stations, and blown up peer exchanges and telecom backbone data centers to cause the maximal number of disconnected networks?
What if the exact answer is 42?
(I won't say "42 of what?", since it could refer to any number of things, but what if 99% of the Internet could be reduced to a finite list of attack targets, given the logistical ability to attack them?)
Does the US gov't have the resources to pull off these kind of logistics in a true WTSHTF emergency?
Yes, I think so.
At the very least, they need to know how to stop any potential enemies from shutting down the Internet, so in order to know how to protect it they also need to know how to destroy it.