

How hard is it to disconnect a country from the Internet? - 001sky
http://www.renesys.com/blog/2012/11/could-it-happen-in-your-countr.shtml

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dendory
Another important point is what would happen to services everyone use. Google
and Microsoft probably don't have much to fear, since they use very
decentralized services and have data centers all over the world. But it's
surprising to see how many well known web sites are hosted at just a few, if
not a single location. During Sandy, when PEER1 went down, that was a single
building, yet it took down major sites for days.

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RandallBrown
If every cable was cut to the United States (and Canada and Mexico I guess)
would we even notice a problem?

Are enough servers located in the US that our Internet service, while
certainly diminished, wouldn't be all that different?

Is there something about the design of the Internet that cutting all those
connections would damage the ones internal to the United States?

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jewel
You can get a feel for this by running netstat -tn and then running a
traceroute to each connection you currently have open.

For example, my connection to news.ycombinator.com takes this path:

Salt Lake City Denver Dallas Houston

My connection to en.wikipedia.org takes the same first three hops and seems to
end in a data center in Dallas.

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aidenn0
It seems like international traffic to/from the US is heavy enough that
cutting down several of the largest international connections could flood the
remaining ones to the point that they are mostly unusable. That would not be
an "off switch" but could potentially really mess things up.

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rdl
A few of these are incorrect -- Somalia has a huge amount of satellite
connectivity through providers who don't bother to SWIP their RIPE blocks. I
suspect it is the same in a lot of other African countries with limited
"official" connectivity.

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splicer
Look out Greenland!

