Kill top level dns

Internet access could be disabled in a couple of ways

• By ISPs
• By Cloud providers as more and more people are using them
• By government organisations
• etc.

But the whole concept of internet will carry on IMO. After all, its just a large LAN.

Coronal Mass Ejection perhaps

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/July_2012_solar_storm

The internet is very resilient at this point.

You would probably need to drop a couple of nukes or orchestrate a combined strategic takeout of thousands of sites

Not so theoretical, actually

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.

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

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.

Just mess with BGP announcements

There is an episode of The IT Crowd that explains how to do it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vywf48Dhyns

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

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.

That's an excellent idea! It's a pretty badly failed experiment.

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

with traffic whitelists

Practically it is not possible in the vast majority of countries in the world.

I guess if there is no electrical power In the entire country..