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?
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.
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)
A 1993 Time Magazine article quotes computer scientist John Gilmore, one of the founders of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, as saying “The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.”[7]
That applied a whole lot more when most connections were using a phone line, and a decent size city could have hundreds of ISPs. But part of the design of a redundant mesh network is that there are tons of different paths to any destination. Cutting any of those links would simply force traffic to other routes.
The early Internet was decentralized in other ways, too. Rather than flock to corporate platforms like Facebook, people spent a lot of time on federated and independent platforms. This included Usenet, IRC, and BBSes. In the event that the feds, lawyers, etc could take one down, a dozen more could spring up overnight. There was such a small barrier to entry, and many were run by hobbyists.
It’s somewhat true today. There are countless Lemmy instances that are completely independent. Pirate Bay famously references the Hydra, and it applies to their peers as well. But these are limited in scope.
Xitter has shown us just how quickly and thoroughly a platform can collapse through hostile admins, and how slowly people will reject it.
I moan about it regularly but this…
Rather than flock to corporate platforms like Facebook, people spent a lot of time on federated and independent platforms. This included Usenet, IRC, and BBSes
Is just tragic isn’t it? We really had it. A global free flow of hobbies, interests, research, debate, exploration.
I don’t know what’s so fundamentally flawed about human nature a) that something that started so well like facebook gets enshitified to the extent that it has and b) why people flock to it like flies round a steaming turd
That’s a big part of the appeal of the fediverse for me. Setting up a personal site used to be fairly easy, but was largely isolated and unidirectional. With the AP protocol, and frankly a lot of self-hostable apps in general these days, you can make something to converse with the whole globe and you don’t even need to make a big effort to help people find it.
Webrings still exist, but finding them is less than trivial when they get drowned out by the noise of corporate sites. I’ve used IRC within the last year, but had to look up the proper use of nicserve commands. The old web mentality is still out there, but for the major part people want simplicity. Few want to go through the learning curve to deal with some of the more esoteric parts of it when they can just auth into a site and do a thing.
The answer to your second point is simple.
Meta’s properties (FB, Insta) have something that most other social networks are lacking: A network of real-world family and friends.
Twitter, Reddit, Mastodon, Lemmy, Tiktok, and the rest all tend to have communities built from the platform’s population, based on shared interests. Meanwhile, FB is the platform that you use to connect with your oddball uncle and high school friends from way back. That’s the sunk cost that makes it so much harder to leave than the strangers on reddit who share your love of lime jello.
“The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.”
As an example of this, one of the easiest and most performant methods a nation has of blocking a website is dictating which DNS records its ISPs return for domains.
This has the advantages that it doesn’t require traffic inspection and doesn’t slow traffic at all.
But it has the disadvantages that it has an all-or-none effect on the domain e.g. it can’t be used to bock specific pages.
It can also be bypassed by simply using an international DNS server. There are people bypassing this kind of censorship without even knowing they are doing so.
I don’t recall ever hearing that specifically
Somewhat similar though, I remember being told that anything you put out on the internet is out there forever. Which may not technically be true, there’s a lot of lost pieces of internet history, but the core of that statement isn’t really to be taken literally, it’s more that once you put something online it’s out of your control what everyone else who might have access to it does with that data, you can’t really control what people download, screenshot, save, repost, or when it may resurface.
But back to what you’re saying - even with China and Russia, and other attempts at censorship, the internet still carries on. You can take down, wall off, censor, etc parts of the internet for a lot of people, but taking the entire internet down would be a massive undertaking, probably more than what any country or even any realistically feasible alliance of countries could hope to achieve, as long as there are people with computers linked together somewhere, the internet endures in some fashion.
There’s a lot of redundancy in the internet, there’s no one big box to blow up or one cable to cut that carries the entirety of the internet, it’s millions of devices all linked together in millions of different ways that make up the internet. You can take down parts of it, maybe even most of of it, but it would be nearly impossible to never every last thread of the internet without some truly apocalyptic event happening, even if all that’s left at the end of the day is two nerds on opposite sides of the planet with ham radios hooked up to laptops sending emails back and forth, or some friends sending memes back and forth on thumb drives via carrier pigeon, you could still say that the internet is alive, if not exactly thriving.
Neither of your examples “take the internet down”. It’s still here, some users are severed.
