In two different threads I’ve seen mention of turning off the internet. What does this mean?
The internet is a series of interconnected sites connected by a protocol. People have been connecting on the internet for decades. Broad commercialization happened when a uniform protocol was adopted somewhere around 1995.
Could the internet be turned off around the world in an instant?
In a crisis, a government might try to shut down the major companies providing the bulk of internet service but there would be ways around that pretty quickly.
I think what people mean by “turning off the internet” is not turning off the (whole) internet but blocking access to the free, uncensored internet as we know it. That may also include making unlimited access to the internet more difficult, forcing people to take extra measures such as VPN, blocking unwanted content, etc. The perfidious effect of all these measures on users is that those people without free access, after a while, don’t notice any more that their access is in fact limited and erroneously believe the accessible part be the whole internet.
At the end of the first day, Facebook and Google have lost over £300m in advertising revenue between them. Most other businesses have ground to a halt as well, since banking, telephone and mobile phone networks all rely on the internet to function.
After a week
The modern power grid relies on the internet to coordinate power plants and electricity substations. Without it, each country’s national grid has become unbalanced, and local outages escalate into a blackout for most of the world. Gas pipelines have shut down since they rely on power and the internet.
After a month
Petrol stations use electricity to pump fuel, and they need an internet connection to monitor tank levels, process transactions, and order new deliveries. Without fuel, supermarkets can’t deliver food, and riots rage around all the major distribution depots. The army is called in, but they need fuel and supplies too.
After a year
In the developed world, most countries have recreated a basic landline telephone network, and have begun to rebuild society. Everywhere else has reverted to an agrarian subsistence economy. The death toll from starvation, cold and unrest is estimated at a billion worldwide. The global economy is back to 1930s levels.
We are the internet, We type a message on our computer, hit Reply and in a second that message appears before your very eyes. Our computers have been linked. There are another trillion machines doing something similar.
We are not talking world outage though Butter…
A good internet techy could disable part of it and perhaps close down a city or even a county.
And sabotage from special forces could do untold damage to a whole countries internet and communications. In fact, future wars will be fought this way.
There have been hick-ups already with customers unable to access their accounts.
No matter how clever we think we are, there is always someone better. Lets just hope they are the good guys.
Although…The internet can influence people better that if it was disabled, so it’s better to keep it and fill it with false news and propaganda…Wait a minute…
The posts I saw didn’t look like that in context. Let’s say that was the argument. It’s an outdated one. That used to be more of a concern 15-20 years ago when there was a monopoly on the cable infrastructure. Companies like Comcast could create tiered services to only allow access to certain companies. Since then, Google has created its own infrastructure in most major cities as have many cities and States.
Also since then, companies are learning from the streaming services that ad based models make more money than subscription based ones so they’d be leaving money on the table.
As to the free and uncensored part, does that exist? Every site I know has ads or a subscription model where someone is paying somewhere in the chain.
Amusing thought experiment. The one below it on what would happen if aliens landed had me smiling with the headline.
Like a lot of thought experiments that everyone runs in their heads, it doesn’t take into account other people’s actions. Google and Facebook, along with governments, wouldn’t just sit there for a year and let this happen. They’d find a way to reroute the information. The outage wouldn’t last long enough to do that much damage.
If every system was crippled to that extent, the internet wouldn’t be the biggest problem.
There’s two parts to your hypothetical. There’s the internet and access to the internet. Cities and counties could lose access to the internet if the internet service providers were disabled and the cell phone towers were disabled as well. But the internet would still be functioning. They would just need to get access back.
In the case of Ukraine, they were able to restore access from satellites.
I’d say in a liberal society as we still know it and compared to dictatorships and to authoritarian regimes it does since people enjoy a large degree of freedom of speech which applies to the internet as well. People living in systems different from ours have a clear idea of what the “free world” is.
Strictly speaking, we know that there’s moral, military, corporate, and political censorship to some extent but that seems to be justified and is , as a rule, legal. What kind of system should replace ours and what degree of censorship were to be expected?
Whoa. That took a turn I wasn’t expecting. I thought you meant free as in no cost, not free speech.
My response was more about how the use of the internet is commercialized to the point where almost none of it where people congregate is actually free. I’ve been chatting online since the 80s. Things were different then.
I’m not a free speech person in the way it’s used on the internet. Most of what people mean by that is they want to say whatever they want without consequences to them. I’m good with free speech as defined in the law where I live.
OK, sticking to your question that I quoted, I didn’t quite understand what you meant by “uncensored” in this context? Do you mean that if a website uses a payment model (ads or subscription) it is then also censored since you put the two words in one sentence or question?
