frossie, I mostly agree with you but I wanted to bring up a couple of points: * As you mentioned, the Prez' authority is (mostly) limited to the US. I say "mos

frossie, I mostly agree with you but I wanted to bring up a couple of points: * As you mentioned, the Prez' authority is (mostly) limited to the US. I say "mostly" because the US has been known to exert economic and even military pressure on other countries that didn't toe the line of US interests. Shutting down the US corner of the Internet would take about 13% of worldwide Internet _users_ offline; in terms of infrastructure and services, I'd wager it would be lots more. Consider that Google, Yahoo, MSN and lots of other globally significant sites are US based. * Something else to consider: Who runs the DNS root servers? Isn't internic run by a US company? In theory, DNS is redundant; in practice, I think loss of the root servers would kick up a lot of disturbance. AFAIK the Internet would be crippled for most intents and purposes without DNS.