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?
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.
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.
This is also due to the size of traffic these days.
Originaly (if we say, take early html as a starting point) it was mostly text, then later a few images.
These days a simple webpage needs large amounts of code and data just to load. So packets having to get to you in a roundabout way doesn’t just make the page take a little longer to load, it will most likely break the page.
But the infrastructure and ways of communication is really hard to take down and except for the few nations that have complete control over their own network, it is nearly impossible to break down communication completely. You would just need to rely on simpler data structures.
As others have stated fewer isp’s and core infrastructure providers do make the global network a bit more vulnerable today. And sites and services that lots of people consider “the internet” can be (at least for a while) taken down/offline.
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.
Because its decentralized. So you can take a part of it out but not the whole thing. Unfortunately in some ways its become centralized.
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)
