An Internet Kill Switch ?

[Rob Seastrom]

Bob Bruhns <bbruhns at erols.com> writes:

> Who makes this stuff up?  The USA could never have had a global
> internet kill switch anyway.  The way the internet works, all anybody
> needs is a routing network and name servers (and guess what, they use
> them every day).

The US could create plenty of havoc (but not an Internet kill by any
stretch) by directing Verisign, a Virginia corporation (in their role
as the DNS root zone maintainer) to put different information in the
root.  The effect would not be instantaneous since the TTL on
delegations out of the root zone is two days, and it would be
discovered very quickly; the root is watched very carefully by many
smart folks.

Not all root nameservers are in the US, and the backlash would be
swift and severe.  The situation would probably be largely normalized
in < 24 hours with irreparable harm to various business and personal
relationships that keep things running in an orderly fashion.

To steal a line from Paul Vixie, we "cherish our relevance", so the
odds of such a thing happening are close to nil.

I don't use phrases like "could never" lightly though.  We're talking
about government mandates and there is a rich history of various
legislative forces demanding things that are totally infeasible.  See
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indiana_Pi_Bill for instance.

-r