{"id":28543,"date":"2019-08-19T15:06:10","date_gmt":"2019-08-19T15:06:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/packetstormsecurity.com\/news\/view\/30416\/What-Would-Happen-If-The-Whole-Internet-Just-Shutdown-All-Of-A-Sudden.html"},"modified":"2019-08-19T15:06:10","modified_gmt":"2019-08-19T15:06:10","slug":"what-would-happen-if-the-whole-internet-just-shutdown-all-of-a-sudden","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.threatshub.org\/blog\/what-would-happen-if-the-whole-internet-just-shutdown-all-of-a-sudden\/","title":{"rendered":"What Would Happen If The Whole Internet Just Shutdown All Of A Sudden?"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\"Illustration<\/span><\/div>\n

Illustration: Benjamin Currie (Gizmodo)<\/p><\/div>\n

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<\/span>Alternate Internet<\/span>This week, we look at the ways the internet could have been\u2014and could be\u2014different.<\/span> <\/span> <\/span><\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n

A world in which the internet suddenly stops: surely the TV show\u2019s already in development. Sprawling cast, gorgeous visuals, tediously on-the-nose themes. Some handsome B-lister tearing around the country in pursuit of his wayward kids, or the shadowy sect that pulled the plug in the first place. A patch of prairie in Kansas with a weak but functional signal, people lining for miles to check texts, riots breaking out. Thankfully, we don\u2019t have to wait for this show to be shot and streamed to get a decent idea of what the internet apocalypse might look like: for this week\u2019s Giz Asks<\/a>, we asked a number of experts to do the imagining for us.<\/p>\n

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Francesca Musiani<\/strong><\/a>
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Researcher at the Institute for Communication Sciences, French National Centre for Scientific Research (ISCC-CNRS), Associate Researcher at the Centre for the Sociology of Innovation, and Global Fellow at American University\u2019s Internet Governance Lab<\/em><\/p>\n

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In the event of a global internet shutdown\u2026<\/p>\n

\u2026autonomous vehicles freeze in place almost instantly. On highways, automatic tolls no longer allow any vehicle to go through them, creating massive traffic jams.<\/p>\n

\u2026on the streets, myriad passersby look at their empty-shell communicative devices, while bearing witness to several crashes of postal or other delivery drones.<\/p>\n

\u2026fully-automated sellers and cashiers, now disconnected, lead to the expeditious shutdown of supermarkets and hypermarkets which exclusively rely on them. In any case, a cashless, electronic currency-based society wouldn\u2019t now know how to pay for things.<\/p>\n

\u2026vast regions are deprived of electricity, as providers are no longer able to receive correctly information from their sensors on the power grid and at individuals\u2019 homes, and are no longer able to properly manage the supply of many areas.<\/p>\n

\u2026almost all the worldwide industrial production stalls. Financial centers have immediately suspended all their operations, canceling, in passing, all orders currently being processed.<\/p>\n

And so on\u2026<\/p>\n

In which world does all of this happen? For the sake of the \u2018thought experiment\u2019, I have answered the question thinking about a 2030-ish temporal horizon\u2014in what is likely to be an era of pervasive Internet of Things. In such a scenario, when a global internet shutdown takes place, interrupting suddenly the overwhelming majority of digital communications, what we today consider \u2018communications\u2019 (writing, chatting and talking by means of digital tools) is only a small part of the problem.<\/p>\n

This scenario may not be exactly playing out like this in 2030, of course\u2014it is indeed likely that the Internet will be a lot more pervasive than today, extending to many of the objects of our daily life and the basic infrastructures organizing our societies, but a lot of the technology I mention may very well not be the one we envisage and manipulate in the present day. However, one tendency seems clear: the extent of the reach of internet infrastructure, and the actors managing it, is expanding.<\/p>\n

Larry Page once said that \u2018Google would be building airports and cities\u2019. It has long been believed that the influence of digital actors will remain confined to software, dematerialized content and information. It starts to be clear that they are using their mastery in these areas to take positions in non-digital markets, be it transport, infrastructure management or banking. Google may not be building cities yet but, directly or through its investments, it is already playing a role as a mobility organizer, while IBM participates in the management of water supply infrastructure in several cities.<\/p>\n

With the ever-increasing connection of infrastructures and objects, the organization of physical flows requires the control of information flows. A global Internet shutdown is likely to have extremely important consequences for a world that will still be physical, but deeply driven and structured by information and data.<\/p>\n

That being said, moving from the thought experiment to the actual functioning of the Internet today, it has to be mentioned that it is extremely unlikely that a global Internet shutdown actually happens. While it is relatively easy to shut down specific parts of the internet for some period of time\u2014as it is well documented here<\/a>\u2014a global one is, at least so far, almost impossible, due to the distributed and interconnected nature of the Internet, as Kevin Curran explains well in his contribution to this page.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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