Very theoretical question.
With a sufficient amount of explosives everything is possible
If states isolated their network infrastructure from other states, the essence of international network would be lost.
Each country would have their own intranet, like Kwangmyong in the DPRK.
So many ways, it’s almost unbelievable that it still works
There is an episode of The IT Crowd that explains how to do it.
Yeah, just unplug your modem.
with traffic whitelists
You can isolate the networks that are part of the Internet by switching off the submarine communication cables. They are considered a military asset by the countries and defended as such.
That’s an excellent idea! It’s a pretty badly failed experiment.
Just mess with BGP announcements
It used to be possible as networks could advertise that they owned IP ranges that they didn’t actually own using BGP, which is what’s used for high level routing. This is what China did around 2010 where they allegedly routed all the internet traffic in the world through China for like 10 minutes. I guess somebody could do that and then just drop every packet.
I expect that’s not possible anymore though, but I’ve been out the game a while so I don’t know for sure.
Kill top level dns
But you could still connect with IP addresses and only the name resolution would get affected right? Please correct me if I’m wrong.
Yes, good luck remember thousands of IPS.
Also, no, all modern websites depends on external resources based on names, all websites would be crippled.
Depends how you define “the Internet”. But if couple of big tier1 carriers null route their BGP, the Internet becomes more or less unusable for large parts, especially now that most of it is synonymous to 5-6 large websites and SaaS providers.
I mean I feel like it’s kind of hard to define what “the internet” really is because it’s so decentralized. Like if you cut all the undersea cables and split the internet into multiple parts, which part is the real internet?
And even if all the commercial ISPs went away, people could still connect their networks together through phone lines or mesh networking so it would be hard to say the internet was really gone
It might die slowly if you take down all root dns servers and keep them off long enough.
Maybe if you disturb BGP between isp’s enough
but I can’t see how either can be done, it’s quite resilliant
