Comment by kpremote | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kpremote | Hacker News Reader

Curious to know, are there ways that a country (in fact mainly the U.S.) can 'flip the switch' (weaponize, if you will) on fundamental internet tech, such as DNS, TCP/IP, HTTP and many many others, to severely affect a foreign adversary's business (either a company or a country)?

Sure those are merely standards/protocols, still, is it possible these tech and their current world-wide setup be effectively used in conflicts by issuing government executive orders or enacting new laws?

Edit: just found this on reddit. Not exactly what I was asking (fundamental internet standards/protocols), but still somewhat related.

From a reddit post -- "Huawei is no longer able or allowed to work on standards for Wi-Fi, USB and SD cards. "Temporarily restricted" by Wi-Fi Alliance, voluntarily withdrew from JEDEC (USB etc) and no longer a member of SD Associaton (which technically means no more SD slots)"

Fundamentally I would say yes, however most of the countries that the US would likely do this to (Russia, Iran, China, Cuba) have contingencies in place through the implementation of country wide intranets[0][1]. Within those countries you also have localized social, financial and e-commerce services that minimize the general populations dependency on foreign companies and services.

So the US could cut cut them off or manipulate their connectivity to the global internet through something like BGP or DNS, but the impact would be far less than the US doing that against a country such as Canada that has a deep reliance on US infrastructure and services.

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/feb/12/great-firewall... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_intranet

China's economy is very export dependent. If Chinese businesses cannot use internet to access a lot of U.S. allies, it would suffer badly.

For example if, say, all U.K's companies are not allowed to use email or skype to talk to the Chinese, or all U.S., Canada and Australia, etc. web sites are not accessible from China because of some executive orders or laws by the U.S. (similar to google complying with the order currently), then I guess China's economy would be severely affected.

Exports only account for 18% of China's GDP.

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