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