The Internet: How easily could it be shut down?

How easy is it to SHUTDOWN the Internet?

The experts and geeks alike will tell you that it is impossible! "Almost, certainly not." They would say in their clearly doubtful manner.

Why not?, you ask. Well, much of the infrastructure, the servers, cabling, satellites, and the internet service providers (ISPs) that run them, is in private hands. A single government might be able to command ISPs in their territory to shut down, but people could still receive data through satellite links controlled by other companies not answerable to that government. Hmm! OK so far.

To extend that shutdown across national borders is barely conceivable. "One very powerful government could have strong effects on their own country, but it would be very difficult to do this on a worldwide basis," says Milton Mueller, and he should know, he represents the international Internet Governance Project.

Who would 'want' to shut down the internet? Even the biggest cyber-attacks cause much less economic damage than closing the internet would. What's more, the experts say, malicious attempts to disable the internet are testimony to the difficulty of the task: the biggest attack in history came in February 2007, and you probably didn't even notice.

This attack attempted to overwhelm the 13 "root name servers" that carry the directory of all the internet addresses in use worldwide - data vital to the smooth running of the net. Two servers, both in the US, were affected, but with 11 others untouched, the attack failed.

ICANN has now begun to implement a further safeguard system, known as Anycast, by which each of the internet's 13 root name servers also acts as a duplicate, or mirror, for some of the others. "A root server in California can be mirrored in Taiwan or the Middle East," Mueller says. "By playing tricks with the addressing, we effectively have hundreds of these root servers."

If cyber-assaults get nowhere in shutting down the net, physical attacks on the infrastructure are unlikely to fare any better. You would have to physically plant bombs to destroy undersea cables, before launching missile attacks on the root name servers that are spread around the planet. "Then the internet will be the least of your worries," says Mueller. "We're talking about full-fledged international war."

There is another question that puzzles me. Why would the cyber-criminals and hackers want to shut down the web? It is the source of all their revenue, thrills and raison d'etre. I believe that the 'manipulation' and 'control' of the internet is a more probably target and that again is only partly possible with or without government funding, allegedly.