[Knight]

Originally Posted by BOfH

The internet is made up of millions, if not billions, of interconnected autonomous networks, each with it's individual owner. Aside from compelling the major backbones to shutdown, which would severely impact .gov as well, nothing short of a national power outage could really bring the whole network down.

As for kill switches: In the beginning there were mainframes that couldn't talk to each other because each vendor used a different protocol in order to ensure victim...er...I mean customer lock-in. Around that same time the DoD through DARPA was looking for a resilient, standards based data communications network, and put the challenge out. Between the DoD and academic individuals who decided that "sneaker net" was exhausting and expensive, the protocols that make up the internet as we know it were born. Eventually it(the internet) broke out of the lab and rapidly caught on in the business world. Nothing about kill switches.

If you really want to impose internet martial law, just shutdown Facebook, Twitter and Myspace for a day.

My .02

Very interesting. So it would be possible for a city or a community to lose the net, and just not, say, a country?