Could the Internet ever be shut down?
The short answer is yes.
The broad answer, which I believe is your actual intent could fill volumes.
Would you care to elaborate?
Gary
Would you care to elaborate?
I guess my question is like any spider web there is a central point. Is there one for the WWW? And could that point be attacked?
There is no central point for the Internet.
It was designed to not have one. The idea for the Internet was originally to be the way the USA would keep communications going from inside the fallout shelters after a nuclear war. While there are an absurd number of flaws with that line of thinking, the end result is decentralization.
Now that the Internet is also heavily wireless, to cut a region out you'd have to cut all signals going in and out.
If people can send to and read from a satellite, then you need to take out all the satellites. If not, then you need to take out all the cell towers, if not then you need to start cutting wires.
The ease of these steps is inverse to the order I listed them.
Eventually we will move two more steps further:
Nanite broadcasters could mean small barely visible clouds of IoT objects short range bouncing signals - cutting off this line would be both absurdly complex and absurdly easy depending ("they're everywhere" vs "They only broadcast a few feet").
Implants could mean every individual becomes a "cell tower" and now cutting off the signal gets near impossible.
These last two I mention in case this is for a Sci Fi story. The very last one is in fact in play in my 'Alien Girls' setting even though I've never mentioned that directly. They all have nanites in them that can spin up a local reference for their AI, Teacher. This also leaves them all always connected in some sense to Teacher. I do plan for a short mention in an upcoming story on this - my characters will see a News story of a kidnapping being thwarted because the Alien is 'always online' and Teacher send in the Federales and some drones. ;)
As you move into Sci Fi, if you do, the options that make the Internet harder and harder to shut out get more and more varied. At the same time there is great story potential here for the impacts this has on culture and privacy.
I have read assessments (several years old, and not necessarily true now, or even then) that it would be possible to reduce global bandwidth by up to ~80% by blowing up only half a dozen major router sites. But while it would reduce download speed for many greatly and believably introduce chaotic outages of some services, it wouldn't shut anything up in principle.
Facebook (before they renamed themselves Meta) managed to introduce routing error that disconnected their entire wast proprietary infrastructure out of the general internet (including denying their own admin access). It took them almost an entire workday to clean that mess up. It's been speculated that a well executed hack attack against DNS could do similar on wide, almost global scale, probably creating disruptions lasting days if not weeks.
reduce global bandwidth by up to ~80%.
For those who remember NetZero and NetScape ISP, been there done that.
I remember a youtube video where they brought a bunch of kids together and tried to explain before cable, DSL and smartphones the only way to get online was through a landline telephone that charged by the minute and would take a long time to display a photo.
Depends on definitions, purposes, and interpretations of what constitutes a shut down state, what are the desired use cases that need alternative routing and so forth,
including, who is doing the shutdown, how and why.
In the most general sense...
The religious answer is a negative, as long there's meaningful inheritance of society.
Yet the technical answer is, of course. It could not be easy to construct necessarily conditions for it, but whatever it takes it's theoretically doable, with enough determination and/or damage applied.
There's been rather successful localized short term general "internet" shutdowns for general public committed by autocratic governments. Those typically didn't stop the information flow completely, but created significant degree of disruption. The turmoil in Kazakhstan at the first days of 2022 comes to mind as probably one of the deepest and longest of such, and most successful in suppressing awareness.
As a counter example, in first days of the 2022 February Russian invasion Ukraine survived concentrated multi domain attack, combining both cyber and kinetic means without dropping offline for a minute. And that attack included taking ViaSat satellite internet offline. Russians managed to completely take out their own secure digital coms in the territory of Ukraine, but Ukraine remained online (and Russians were forced to use open radio or loot Ukrainian network mobile phones).
Yes, and it's a relatively low-tech solution.
Kill ALL electricity generating power sources. No power, no internet.
All the other stuff everyone else is discussing? Not a chance. It might slow things down a lot, but the internet is designed to work around minor details like losing router sources and server farms.
Hell, you can download Wikipedia to your own PC, and it doesn't take up that much room.
Kill ALL electricity generating power sources. No power, no internet.
Even this one is getting more and more complicated as distributed power grids start to filter out there.
Imagine if a large portion of the population has solar power with battery backups like the Tesla Powerwall and it's competitors. They can stay powered, and they can even become their own localized grids.
That noted - under current infrastructure they are not making their own peer-to-peer networks. We were headed that way 20 years ago but industry pushed back against it because peer-to-peer was mostly being used to do illegal file sharing.
However that very same technology could give us networks that simply can't be taken down as long as 2 or more people still have working solar power and some way to connect (cell, satellite, or even a nanite mesh grid if we're in a near-future setting).
The nanite example I mentioned in my prior post is that nanite mesh grid, an idea that was put forth about a decade ago when 'smart tech' started popping up.
You keep those things powered by having each nanite have a solar cell and a battery that can power it for a few days. We have that good of solar and battery already, and we can make that nanite - it's just comically expensive to do so right now. But it's a cool idea for near future tech.
The idea is that if/when nanites got cheap to make, you'd just crop dust an area with them, and they'd turn "all of reality" into a cloud of smart tech. The logic of this breaks down if you look into it too deeply as a 'put them everywhere' notion, but done strategically it could start to make some sense.
On modern tech - given solar power - your best knockout strategy is to destroy cell towers. Most people won't have satellite hookups. But military and government will.
On the other hand, anywhere with solar but not battery backups, cutting off the power grid actually shuts off solar as not doing so means workers repairing the power grid can be electrocuted by residential solar. People will electrician skills could defeat this and isolate their own solar off of the grid - but you'd still be able to knock them out for a few key hours until they isolated their system and brought it back on. And most solar owners do not have battery backups as the battery tech is, I think, just shy of a decade old and until very recently was only something Tesla offered.
So yeah - shutting off the grid will knock out most people, but in a decade that won't be true anymore. It's actually going to be less effective the more third world you go. The less stable the public grid, the more people opt for these side technologies. Thus why cellphones took off in the third world faster than they did in the first world.
Kill ALL electricity generating power sources. No power, no internet.
Even this one is getting more and more complicated as distributed power grids start to filter out there.
But in the US due to a combination of stockholder greed and environmentalist obstructionism the grid mostly relies on wires from the 1960s at the newest.
Against human action it may survive.
Against a CME such as the Carrington Event?
The internet could be shutdown, at least on a national basis.
Many nations are capable of denying internet access to the majority of their own populations. Primarily by the cooperation and/or coercion of internet service providers, and cellular phone service providers. Selective shutdown of electrical power, and perhaps cellular jamming.
Google, Facebook, and many other corporations grovel to the Chinese Communist government. CCP also comples most of its population to use Chinese Communist government internet services.
Some nations may be able to deny the internet to neighboring nations.
The USA and Communist China are probably capable of knocking out, or at least suppressing the internet to specific areas, for at least 96 hours, perhaps more. This would be layered, including influence/coercion of service providers, cyber warfare, knocking out the electrical grid, destroying towers and nodes. At the extreme end of the spectrum could include EMP and other nuclear attacks.
I believe the Chinese Communists are even more capable than the USA. Not so much technologically, but in sheer ruthlessness! They are willing to take measures and withstand the consequences (or believe they will not suffer significant consequences; they may be correct).
Google, Facebook, and many other corporations have proven they will comply with Communist Chinese government dictates. Tech companies turn over information on Faulun Gong members to the Communist Chinese, whilst denying assistance to Western governments trying to track down specific human traffickers, or child rapists!
Undersea cables carry more than 95% of all international internet traffic and are vulnerable to spying and sabotage. These networks have become weapons of influence in an escalating competition between the US and China over advanced technologies https://reut.rs/3K7ZU5m
It 'was' true when I first got onto the net quite a few years ago, that the internet ran through 7 routers. Whilst you would not 'down' the whole thing. If you could incapacitate these 7 or the current equivalent. Then you at the very least 'break' it into smaller 'parts'. 'DNS' is a particular weakness of the internet. Not as much now but these 'points' are part of the backbone, isolate those services and 90+% of the Web is brought down. How many people actually know the IP address of all the websites they like to visit? The Web is only a small part of the internet as a whole keep that in mind with this question.
The internet is now much more 'complex' now then in the past. But as complexity increases so do some kinds of weakness. So the internet of today is more of an organisim than a machine. It heals and regenerates and carries on and even mutates. Who knows what the net of the 'future' would look like or be vulnerable to? As with everything InfoSec it's a moving target. Things continue to change at an ever increasing rate. This question and its answers change constantly. It could be very different as early as next week if some change comes unannounced or unintended. Look how Facebook took themselves out with a single wrong entry not that long ago. No they were not 'removed' from the internet, just their access was disabled.
The old adage is the more things change, the more they stay the same. This is both true and false for the internet, an oversimplification if you will. To take down something this large, with resiliency built into its DNA in the cold war, taking down the internet is an ever harder task but disabling it is another matter all together. So the answer is Yes, but.