The U.S. government couldn’t shut down the Internet, right? Think again | Hacker News Reader

The U.S. government couldn’t shut down the Internet, right? Think again

washingtonpost.com

16 points74025 comments

The whole idea of the Internet (originally 'ARPANET' or 'DARPANET' -'Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency Network') was designed so that if whole areas were destroyed in a nuclear war, the system would rout around the 'dead area' and continue working.

Shut down the US networks - and the rest of the world would continue normally and disregard the US as a 'dead area'.

The rest of the world will surely continue normally once Google, Facebook, YouTube, etc are down, sure.

There’s ‘normally’ and ‘normally’. There might not be as much English-language content, but the Internet exists outside of FAANG.

It's a nice click bait article, it isn't explicitly mentioned the article but it's implied that if the COVID-19 got out of hand the government could shutdown the Internet. It can't happen in the U.S.

There is too much critical infrastructure that relies on the Internet, and I'm not talking about Government stuff, I mean water utilities, electric utilities, gas utilities, finance, and not their SCADA systems, but their ERP systems, finance systems, etc. Almost all B to B commerce runs across the Internet. I'm sure there are still some hold over dinosaurs, but most things traverse the Internet.

Trump is doing everything he can to placate big business and the stock market. If he were to turn off the Internet he would stop almost all U.S. Businesses, it would be like driving into a 30 ft thick concrete wall at 180 MPH.

Turning off the Internet would also cause a public panic of epic proportions, taking a bad situation and making it so much worse.

I agree with the sentiment that shutting down the entire Internet would cause potentially catastrophic damage to society, but I'm not sure that's the point. Take this quote:

>That means if a sitting president wants to shut down the Internet or selectively cut off a social media outlet or other service, all it takes is an opinion from his attorney general that Section 706 gives him the authority to do so.

Selectively cut off Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, news sites, blogs? Still damaging, but much more realistic than basically shutting off utilities. I think the author is right to point out that the President has an incredible amount of power over the Internet and that this arrangement should be reconsidered.

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