Would it be possible to destroy the Internet?
SHORT ANSWER:
Not the whole Internet, but your country’s Internet could be disrupted, with a bit of effort…
LONG ANSWER: These days, we take the Internet for granted. It’s just sort of there. Where? Everywhere.
From top-secret military communications system in the 1960s, to semi-academic geek passion project in the 1980s, to lame “cyberspace” and “information superhighway” TV ads in the 1990s, the Internet has since evolved to nothing less than an essential service. Like electricity, or running water. Life without an Internet connection today, is getting increasingly inconvenient.
So you’d be right to worry about the Internet being destroyed, or switched off, or in some way disrupted so hard that you couldn’t get access to your bank account. Which is probably the most significant concern for most of us.
And yet we’re told not to worry, because part of the whole point of the Internet was to create a communications network that could survive, well, a nuclear attack.
SO MUCH INTERNET
“The Internet” as a thing, basically consists of millions of computers all connecting to and requesting information from millions of servers. Confusingly, your desktop PC can be a (very slow) server, so it’s less about hardware and more about how things are configured.
Anyway, the point is that to get to your favourite website – www. scienceillustrated.com.au – your Internet service provider needs to be able to request information from a server (a type of computer) that stores all the pictures and text on our website, and also which runs various programs to organise and label that content in such a way so, when the information reaches your web browser, it gets automatically laid out into a nicely designed page you can read. Phew!
Opportunities to disrupt that process occur in several places. Your personal connection to the Internet – your phone line or cable – could stop working for some reason. Or your ISP could have a disruption, since its job is to take a giant stream of data and split it up into thousands or even millions of individual streams which send the information requested by its customers, to their personal computers, tablets or phones.
If your ISP lost its big pipe to the Internet at large, you might not be able to use the Internet for a while. Various versions of this kind of disruption happen from time to time, and usually get fixed within hours.
Finally, the system that allows us to actually request information, or webpage – the Domain Name System – could be disrupted. The DNS is important because actual servers don’t have easy to remember names like www.scienceillustrated.com.au,
Destroying just two points could sever our undersea cable links to the US
they have Internet Protocol (or IP) addresses, which currently take the form of four numbers 0-255, like 203.22.18.143. That’s not very easy to remember, so the Domain Name System turns the addresses we know into the IP numbers so servers can give us our information.
Disruption or destruction of the Domain Name System would cause a lot of problems actually browsing, but it wouldn’t actually destroy the Internet.
SUPER ANTI-FRAGILE LINKED ELECTRIC DATA LOCUS
At the local level, a cut cable will take you off the Internet until Telstra, or whoever, comes out and physically fixes or replaces it. At the international level though, the Internet is designed to automatically route itself around any physical disruptions.
For instance, when a major server network was physically destroyed in New York during the 9/11 attacks, the Internet in Manhattan was only disrupted for 15 minutes while the system (and the diligent technicians who work on it) rerouted.
That said, there are points that must maintain 24/7 operation, to ensure individual countries can maintain truly global access to the Internet.
Here in Australia, we can use a whole bunch of different physical networks to access national-level internet. There’s ADSL over old phone lines, there’s fibre-optic cable (both NBN and pre-NBN systems), and of course all the mobile phone towers providing 4G signals.
But to get information from an American website, we send a request via undersea communication cables. (It's actually a bit more complex than this, but it's true at a fundamental level.)
One of the major links is operated by a company called Southern Cross Cable.
DEEP PIPES
This massive, 28,900 km “triple-ring” undersea cable connects Australia and the US, from Oregon and California, via Hawaii, Fiji and New Zealand.
On our end, it has “landing points” in Alexandria and Brookvale in Sydney. That’s just two points which, if bombed to bits by some enemy, would severe a huge chunk of our bandwidth to the US.
Of course, there are contingency plans in place for this. Yet even without war or terrorism, the cable does get damaged from time to time.
The most common cause: an undersea earthquake or volcano deals some amount of physical damage. But the system is designed to handle this too. When an earthquake destroyed part of the cable in 2008 – we’re talking tonnes of rock and mud smooshing a component called a “shunt” - backup systems and “spare capacity” meant that people at home using the Internet didn’t even notice!
The real threat to the Internet today is having the system clogged up or gridlocked by some kind of malicious software or other “virus”.
Actually physically severing our data connection to the rest of the planet is getting harder, and harder. And that’s a great thing.