Can internet destroyed

Localised, temporary disruption is little more than a nuisance. Danny Hillis, an early pioneer of internet technology, pointed this out to an audience at TED in see below. This video is no longer available. He realised this. And yet, every day the internet gets bigger and more indispensable.

The truth is, we need the internet so much that no-one wants to think about it not being there. But maybe, one day, that may come back to haunt us. In Depth Internet. The disastrous events that would break the internet. Share using Email.

By Chris Baraniuk 11th March Could the internet ever be switched off — or destroyed? Chris Baraniuk investigates what it would take to bring down the network we all now rely on. The clear majority of these cables are unarmored, unguarded, small and relatively delicate — about the size of a garden hose. Isolated faults caused by natural phenomena, or even the occasional errant anchor, are usually not a problem because traffic is instantly rerouted to other cables.

Still, accidents do happen. In , a year-old woman shoveling for shoreline copper severed a cable and took down internet access in Armenia for five hours. This brings us to the first of our internet crash scenarios — the deliberate sabotage of undersea cables, either by terrorists or more likely military forces.

In early , NATO officials publicly disclosed that Russian submarines had dramatically increased activity around undersea data cables connecting Europe and North America.

Navy Rear Adm. If Russia were to sever all or most of the cables in the Pacific and Atlantic in a coordinated strike, the move wouldn't quite crash the internet. But it would essentially isolate America and, more to the point, disrupt communications between the U. Nefarious human activities aren't the only potential risk to the internet.

Although they are the scariest, more on that in a bit. In , a committee within the nonprofit organization ICANN issued a rather alarming report concerning a potential weakness buried deep in the internet's underlying structure.

According to the committee report, a vulnerability in the internet's address book system could potentially magnify the effect of any physical disruption to root servers or undersea cables. Ironically, the dilemma is keyed to the central strength of the internet — redundancy. The details get pretty complex.

If you speak high-end engineering, you can read the original report. In practical terms, the internet would simply stop working. Surely the most dramatic of all the potential internet doomsday scenarios, the possibility of a massive solar flare has kept experts up nights for several decades. Solar flare concerns predate the internet, actually. Science has long known that a major solar flare could produce an electromagnetic pulse EMP that could, theoretically, fry all electronics on the planet.

Levinson concurs, and adds that other threats might descend from the heavenly firmament as well. Even if we set aside natural disasters, cosmic blasts and coding glitches, we still have at least one other major threat to worry about. This is the scenario that is most popular in sci-fi films, high-tech thrillers, and pop culture in general. But consider a smaller nation like New Zealand, connected to the rest of the world by just two cables. With a couple serious snips in the right place, an entire country gets knocked offline divers in Egypt were caught doing exactly this in If that effort were carried out at a larger scale, or deep in a remote part of the ocean, it would wreak a lasting havoc difficult to recover from.

But we are accessing the internet in an increasingly homogenous way; a hack or flaw in these dominant systems — or a questionable decision by Google and Apple — could make the internet disappear for more than a third of the 3.

There is simultaneously relief and caution here. IE 11 is not supported. For an optimal experience visit our site on another browser. However, in Egypt last year, many protesters found ways to bootstrap connectivity and bypass the shut-off, such as by using smartphones to communicate with the global Internet over cellular networks and tapping into private companies' Intranet connections. If, in future, the U. Governments could also simply tax Internet access, or providers could jack up the prices, in such a way as to price it out of reach of most people.

Lehr added that, while no single government could destroy the Internet everywhere, it could certainly cripple it sufficiently to render its use unattractive for people within its country of governance. In the balance Bad regulation, be it in any particular country or on the international scale, could severely hamper the Internet's value and its ability to grow, Lehr said.

While some version of the Internet is likely to exist as long as humanity does, what might be lost or greatly diminished is "the openness of the Internet. This openness is useful both economically and socially, but it is also a source of problems, Lehr noted; it lends itself to endless security and privacy attacks , junk mail, viruses, malware and so on.

He believes new security models must be developed to protect privacy and security while still allowing the Internet to function. All rights reserved. Already a subscriber?