No Stupid Questions

The internet was originally designed to withstand nuclear war, so that a functioning military network could coordinate a retaliation quickly.

The network protocols themselves are self-healing, routing around failures, very resilient.

The internet itself, even today, is incredibly difficult to destroy. It is nearly impossible to take it down.

However, the internet that most people think of as the internet, Facebook Google etc. Are centralized services that are trivial to take down.

Peer to peer protocols like email, torrents, are also nearly impossible to take down.

The examples of Russia and China isolating themselves, are different. That's the network designers isolating the network. It's not a third party trying to destroy the network.

This opinion remains largely correct - the Internet as a network is very difficult to take down.

However things have happened that have undermined the Internet in favour of commercial priorities.

Net Neutrality was a major principle of the Internet but that is under attack, particularly in the US, where infrastructure providers want to maximise profit by linking their income to each Gb used rather than just paid as a utility. Their costs are largely fixed in infrastructure but they push the lie that they need to be paid for how busy that infrastructure is. A network router doesn't care whether it's transferring 1gb or 10gb, it only matters if you hit capacity and the network needs to be expanded. The Internet providers instead want profit profit profit so are pushing for a way to maximise it.

The other major issue has been consolidation and that's thanks to monopolies being allowed to form and dictate how the Internet works. Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon and Apple - they've all used their services to try to manipulate customers into their walled gardens and prevent competition.

So the Internet as many people think of it is very vulnerable - big centralised services can have outages that affect everyone because people don't have much choice.

But the reality is the underlying protocols and infrastructure remains robust. Google might have an outage, but the Web itself is still functional. Email protocols and file transfer protocols still work. The problem is people who are sitting in Googles walled garden of services are locked out of everything. And with Googles huge monopoly on search and advertising it means lots of other major services are out too.

So the Internet itself is fine. It's the services and monopolies built on it thay are the problem.

I'm confused. You're citing the actions of a country to impact its own Internet as evidence they can take the Internet down?

That's like saying me disconnecting my microwave proves that I can take down the power grid.

The basic building blocks of the internet were designed by DARPA, and it was designed with that military mentality of "If the ruskies nuke any part of our infrastructure, the rest of it should keep running." You can chop large parts of the internet off and those parts stop working but the rest of it keeps going. Here's an extreme example: I can unplug my cable modem and disconnect my house from the internet completely, yet I can still access the web pages hosted by my switch, Wi-Fi router and NAS through my local area network.

The internet couldn't and still can't be taken down - but countries can certainly restrict it within their locale (though it is insanely difficult).

The opinion is that the internet as a concept and set of protocols was and is too widespread to ever fully dismantle and one dude with a mission can capture and preserve an immense amount of data.

That's still all true but doesn't hold for social media walled gardens which have come to control a huge proportion of communication.

A 1993 Time Magazine article quotes computer scientist John Gilmore, one of the founders of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, as saying "The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it."[7]

That applied a whole lot more when most connections were using a phone line, and a decent size city could have hundreds of ISPs. But part of the design of a redundant mesh network is that there are tons of different paths to any destination. Cutting any of those links would simply force traffic to other routes.

The early Internet was decentralized in other ways, too. Rather than flock to corporate platforms like Facebook, people spent a lot of time on federated and independent platforms. This included Usenet, IRC, and BBSes. In the event that the feds, lawyers, etc could take one down, a dozen more could spring up overnight. There was such a small barrier to entry, and many were run by hobbyists.

It's somewhat true today. There are countless Lemmy instances that are completely independent. Pirate Bay famously references the Hydra, and it applies to their peers as well. But these are limited in scope.

Xitter has shown us just how quickly and thoroughly a platform can collapse through hostile admins, and how slowly people will reject it.

Because then it was a robust network with a myriad websites and not just those four websites linking to each other. Also, they weren't all dependant on adsense or akamai to function.

"The internet sees censorship as damage and routes around it."

From a very primitive perspective, this is true. Many of the infrastructure protocols (DNS, BGP, etc.) that the internet sits on are designed to be resilient and fault tolerant. Block access to a DNS server, and the system will find another one. Usually. Depending on circumstances.

Firewalling an entire country is incredibly difficult. From a technical point of view, the GFoC is only modestly successful. It blocks casual and accidental access to the 'outside world' just fine, but for the determined operator there are absolutely ways around it - VPNs, cellular networks, satellite relays, you name it.

But do you want to risk having the police show up at your door with orders to kill on sight?

This is fundamentally no different than content filtering in a typical office. From my work computer, I can't get to porn sites. If I really wanted to, I could find a way - but the odds are pretty good that HR would be at my desk with termination papers and a security escort out of the building.

If Russia disconnects, or get disconnected, then they're just not part of the internet anymore. The internet itself will continue to exist though - and probably would be quite a bit better.

Because its decentralized. So you can take a part of it out but not the whole thing. Unfortunately in some ways its become centralized.

I think it's mostly because of how rapid the internet was at becoming more accessible. It was inevitable as to how big it'd become.

And the opinion then changed from that to "The internet never forgets" which was more in the mid-2000s and early 2010s. This is 50/50 because it really depends. Some sites shut down for good, so if there was anything or anyone on it, then we can safely say the internet forgot. But that opinion mostly applies to whenever someone becomes a lolcow or someone who generally does something so stupid online that it's everywhere. Hence the internet communities not forgetting.

A big change between the internet in the 90's/00's and today, is that today we don't really have this internet with "all computer being equal", we have a dozen of facebook/google/reddit/tiktok massive websites, and it's relatively easy to close one of these.

in the 90's a judge could ask an ISP to close the homepage of someone without impacting the whole internet

Authoritarian regimes must control the flow of information if they want to continue to exist. Just because they can disconnect themselves from the rest of the world doesn't mean they've "taken down the Internet. "

Those countries are controlling access at the very few origin points. And they can still be foiled by tunnels, VPNs, and Encryption. The only counter is to actually cut the network at that origin point. But that still gives a country sized internet that's very resilient. Could they start isolating cities? Depends on their infrastructure. I know the mid size town I lived in could be shut down with one cable. (Because road construction hit it at least once a year and 80,000 people lost Internet for a couple days each time)

When it was first envisioned it was supposed to be an actual web. With multiple points of contact at each place. Instead we've consistently done the bare minimum to bring the Internet to each place. Meaning in many places there's only one connection. For an international look at connection points there are undersea cable maps. It becomes clear quite quickly how easy it is to isolate a single country's web.

There is a lot of confused misinterpretation in this thread. "Can't be taken down" was a thing, but it was about how you can lose big chunks of the network and have the rest of it still work. That was misinterpreted at the time, in fairness, and it's even less true now, where centralization in both the infrastructure and the hosting have a lot of things dropping at once and being disrupted, but it's still technically true. Ukrainian drones are out there beaming up to satellite internet and being used in active warfare in the middle of a battlefield. Which hey, in that context, robust military communication was the original intent of the network to begin with. Given the previous baseline is wired telephone, the characterization isn't that far off.

Censorship is different, but also true. You can isolate a chunk of the Internet, and once you've done that if you have very centralized control you can monitor it, but that's a high bar. And of course outside of those cases people struggle to limit communications they don't want, from nazi chatter to piracy.

At the time I used to think that was a good thing, now... yeah, harder to justify. Turns out "free information" didn't automatically make everyone smarter. I have lots of apologies to give to teachers and professors of theory of communication that were trying to explain this to us in the 90s and we were all "nah, man, their only crime was curiosity, hack the planet, free the information" and all that.

This has obviously been proven false with the Great Firewall of China, and of Russia's latest attempts of completely disconnecting from the global internet.

Not it hasn't. Pretty much the only country which manages it is NK, and that's because they have 100% control of their citizens.

With TOR and mesh networking, some sort of a system will remain no matters who tries what. The level or communication that was extremely centralised and possibly censored were things before the 80's. After that, you could just host your own site online and "hide the ip" (not really tho but hosting your things in another country was sort of an equivalent). So information starred glowing much mire freely.

And becsuse all these techs exist, communication will ever regress to such a state that it was in.

So an exaggeration, sort of. Depending on how you define "internet".

Neither of your examples "take the internet down". It's still here, some users are severed.

over the years i think the internet has proved to be a bit flaky

BGP https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Border_Gateway_Protocol has proved to be non-trivial and mistakes have been made both accidentally and maliciously that have broken large chunks of the internet

having said that i think that things like P2P protocols - Kademlia, Gnutella, UDP bittorent, TOR etc have proved to be very resilient and hard or impossible to break despite concerted efforts to do so. these protocols have adapted to hide using VPN, HTTP and other tunneling techniques and services have distributed themselves effectively such that they have never been eradicated

It is just the services themselves are centralised now (it wasnt always like this) federation is taking us back closer to the old ideal.

Because back then the Internet wasn't controlled by just a few big corporations.

I don't recall ever hearing that specifically

Somewhat similar though, I remember being told that anything you put out on the internet is out there forever. Which may not technically be true, there's a lot of lost pieces of internet history, but the core of that statement isn't really to be taken literally, it's more that once you put something online it's out of your control what everyone else who might have access to it does with that data, you can't really control what people download, screenshot, save, repost, or when it may resurface.

But back to what you're saying - even with China and Russia, and other attempts at censorship, the internet still carries on. You can take down, wall off, censor, etc parts of the internet for a lot of people, but taking the entire internet down would be a massive undertaking, probably more than what any country or even any realistically feasible alliance of countries could hope to achieve, as long as there are people with computers linked together somewhere, the internet endures in some fashion.

There's a lot of redundancy in the internet, there's no one big box to blow up or one cable to cut that carries the entirety of the internet, it's millions of devices all linked together in millions of different ways that make up the internet. You can take down parts of it, maybe even most of of it, but it would be nearly impossible to never every last thread of the internet without some truly apocalyptic event happening, even if all that's left at the end of the day is two nerds on opposite sides of the planet with ham radios hooked up to laptops sending emails back and forth, or some friends sending memes back and forth on thumb drives via carrier pigeon, you could still say that the internet is alive, if not exactly thriving.

Because that was ours purpose in the first place.

Probably because of the (originally) decentralized nature. But it is everything but decentralized, pretty much like water infrastructure or streets. So many single points is failure. Sure you could drive 1000 miles through 100 towns, and with only few doing that it will "only" take a lot longer. But route a mayor portion of the traffic through there and that will be the end of that.

Depends on how much can be taken down via software or hardware. Hardware wise undersea data cables carry all the traffic of the internet and when they're cut the internet will stop working. Software wise, the internet is hard to take down because most means; like the law, malware, and other attacks only affect invidiual websites. Even if AWS were taken down, they would have backups to reduce the outage, and that kind of attack would be as difficult as cutting an undersea data cable. (But the Russians are testing their ability to cut them.)

Because you literally were calling other computers directly. As long as you had dial tone you had internet.

Also, phone books existed for the internet. Google wasn’t a thing, so getting from one website to another was peer distributed by mouth and paper.

It’s incredibly hard to take that offline.