In addition because the providers and cables are owned and operated by private companies the government would have a very hard time convincing telcos to do that.
Hell even internally you can’t with every major city having 2 or 3 places where providers can connect with Google, Amazon, Facebook, Cloudflare, Akamai. Not to mention all the private peering locations.
From a political POV, make legislation that says registered telcos must turn off telecommunications equipment connected to non US locations or black hole non us traffic when entering the country when requested by a government.
From a technical POV, have the Armed Forces drop depth charges on those cables where they cross our borders. Sure there would be legal challenges, but the damage would already be done, probably for years based on how prosecuting him for January 6th has gone.
Ordering Amazon to turn off their servers (or more likely block all but government-approved connections) would result in about 70% of the internet going offline, even without cutting the cables. This can be accomplished with emergency powers.
Poison or shut down US-based root DNS servers; also accomplishable with emergency powers, but the easiest to route around.
Yes, this would all be a phenomenally stupid idea. New York City alone lost ten billion dollars per day while they were offline from Sandy. My job - hell, the entire company I work for - would evaporate instantly with no internet, and so would the livelihoods of most Americans. But this fucking guy doesn’t care about any of that. Don’t think the law will get in his way, don’t think fear for the country’s future will stop him. If the rest of the government allows him to be a candidate and he gets elected, despite the Fourteenth Amendment, the US is toast.
That’s just a frozen hunk of poopy. You see airplanes dump their toilets at 36000 feet and it freezes and falls down to earth. With call those Boeing bombs.
As for the US and Europe, things are too interconnected for that to work. That said, the Internet as a whole is more centralized than you might expect from its history as a network that was supposed to be nuclear war proof.
All paths lead to the singularity. There is no going back. Every stumbling block can be circumvented. But if he was determined, he’d probably declare war on the undersea cables that transfer the internet between countries, which is so easy to do we’ve had to stop sharks and pistol shrimp from doing it.
This story reminds me of an ex girlfriend that wanted me to open up. So I did. She left me after that. The end result was good though, as it made me realize I needed some professional mental assistance.
That’s my experience, too. Most of the times I’ve opened up to a girlfriend, it’s turned them off. They thought they wanted me to, but they regretted it, which made me regret it. Either that or they later used it to manipulate me. So I just stopped.
newsweek.com
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