Or am I the only one remembering this opinion? I felt like it was common for people to say that the internet couldn’t be taken down, or censored or whatever. 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. Where did this idea come from?
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.
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.
Mind you that a lotmof that no longer works
In the past traffic could be routed over whatever. If one node went down, the traffic would go over another
Now we have a few very fast backbones and if even one goes down bye bye internet
What you have cached locally or on your doesn’t count because it’s only that which you’ve seen before.
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.
Yes, mostly. It’s distributed and federated. Peer to peer at the email server level
Domain A users can message domain B users directly without going to any other domain.
Fun fact email can also handle variable availability networks and use forwarding agents to get a message through even indirectly (though most people don’t configure this anymore, in the days of dialup this was more common)
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.
disconnecting my microwave proves that I can take down the power grid
DO NOT DISCONNECT YOUR MICROWAVE!
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.
