[governance] Could the U.S. shut down the internet?

[Karl Auerbach]

On 02/03/2011 07:05 AM, Lee W McKnight wrote:

> To: Lee W McKnight
> Subject: I just saw it on CNN.com: Could the U.S. shut down the internet?
>
> Just as I predicted, the Senators proposing the Presidential Internet 'kill-switch' bill

Uh, when we were building the proto-internet (the ARPAnet) we built it 
to keep running despite the best efforts of a full fledged nuclear 
attack from the old USSR.

(Perhaps the reason for the stories that say that security against 
attack was not a goal arise because the technical community was severely 
partitioned back then into a public-research side, which we hear about, 
and a military side, which was very much out of the public eye, and even 
subject to military classification rules - even open work we did for the 
old US National Bureau of Standards [now NIST] has never seen the 
digital light of day - at best it is part of what Vernor Vinge called 
digital "prehistory" in his book "Rainbows End".)

DNS *does* represent a residual single point of failure/attack/killswitch.

But the dogma of the singular, catholic (lower case 'c') DNS root is 
just a dogma.  (The real issue is not singularity of a DNS root but, 
rather, consistency of DNS query results.)

	--karl--
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