12 ms·

Deliberate Internet Shutdowns

327 points by WaitWaitWha 10mo ago

kallo 10mo ago
Ha
stogot 10mo ago
Its become clear that the axiom “The Net Interprets Censorship As Damage and Routes Around It” as no longer true. It hasnt been since before 2010 anecdotely but the data Schneier presents here is undeniable
- cyberax 10mo ago
  This is still somewhat true. For example, Russia is now frequently shutting down mobile Internet. Ostensibly for protection against drone attacks, but even it had to relent a bit and allow at least some whitelisted services to work. So immediately local VPN companies started providing the unrestricted access through proxies at these services.
- hulitu 10mo ago
  It hasn't been true since 9/11 when the US name servers were "shut down" and traffic was dropped ftom level3 nodes.
  - stogot 10mo ago
    What name server / level3 event was this?
karel-3d 10mo ago
Ahh I just wanted to host my website in Afghanistan. (there are actual web hosting companies in Kabul, and it seems its not illegal to send money there)
ffuxlpff 10mo ago
One more reason to resist the fragile lifestyle that requires constant internet access. Even if you don't live in a totalitarian country where shutting down the net would be easy and probable. Some time ago someone posted in Twitter a letter of Theodore Kaczynski giving life advice, one point being not to use internet for more than one hour a day. Too bad I couldn't find it anymore.
- dijit 10mo ago
  why is this flagged? (maybe Theo? I don’t know this person). Its absolutely a good argument against fragile IoT devices that have no local/offline mode and the ever increasing lurch of internet requirements for our daily life. I’m not sure my phone does much of anything without an internet connection. Yet it is my primary banking and authentication method (via BankID). EDIT: Theodore Kaczynski is the unabomber… well, thats an odd name to drop and maybe not an ideal candidate for life advice.
  - IAmGraydon 10mo ago
    It's getting downvoted because (1) this person is suggesting the answer to governments taking away our ability to freely communicate is to stop freely communicating (2) he's giving life advice from a terrorist mass murderer. Yes, you're not at risk from being cut off from the world if you're not connected to it in the first place. That's not a state most of us want to exist in. Ted Kaczynski lived in a small cabin in the woods away from humanity.
    - blueflow 10mo ago
      > this person is suggesting the answer to governments taking away our ability to freely communicate is to stop freely communicating You equate comms with internet. Maybe you should talk to people IRL more often.
      - IAmGraydon 10mo ago
        No one in their right mind believes that you can accomplish widespread, high speed communication via "talking to people IRL" like you can with the internet. It has become a very important way that we share information broadly, deal with emergencies, and stay informed. Going back to the stone age is not a good option at this point. But you know that, and you're just posting nonsense to have an argument.
stego-tech 10mo ago
The post is mainly just a CTA against further internet centralization and government control of core infrastructure, which is fine. We need more of these, and we need more examples of their harms for folks to draw on. HN often gets distilled down to a singular cause - EU's Chat Control, Elon's shutdown of Starlink over Ukraine, a regional outage of a public cloud provider - but generalized topics like these aren't really discussed all too often I find, or are often flagged for a variety of reasons and shutdown. As technologists of multiple stripes and disciplines - programmers, developers, engineers, architects, designers, product managers, etcetera - we need to collaborate more on the direction of our industry as a whole, rather than just specific niches we find appealing. From my specific perspective in IT, the increasing centralization across every vendor category (three major x86 server manufacturers, two CPU vendors, two GPU makers, three global-scale public clouds, ISP mono- and duopolies, a handful of commercial operating systems, a near-monopoly EUVL supplier - the list goes on) is a dire threat to not just the open internet, but open technology in general. We need to be better advocates for and champions of the technological future we envision, rather than just blindly celebrate startups and tech fads all the time. Mr. Schneier is merely the latest and largest canary in the proverbial coal mine.
- CodingJeebus 10mo ago
  It’s hard to be a better advocate without diving into the politics of why we’re in the situation we are, which also doesn’t address the amount of political power you and I have relative to the interests that want said technological consolidation to exist. And given that the tech community trends towards political philosophies like libertarianism, which is inherently anti-organization and anti-collectivist, I’m not sure how you begin to scratch the surface of what a real solution looks like.
  - nradov 10mo ago
    Politics are a factor but economics is a bigger one. With any technology, each successive generation inevitably requires larger and larger capital investments. Ideally governments should do more to preserve competition but when it costs >$10B to develop a new microchip manufacturing process that inherently limits how many players the market can support. And if one company bets on the wrong technology or gets the timing wrong that can leave them too financially weak to survive.
modeless 10mo ago
I thought this would be advocating "chaos monkey" style intentional shutdown to test institutions for resiliency in an outage situation. Might not be a bad idea. Maybe once every four years on leap day or something.
- flakes 10mo ago
  > Maybe once every four years on leap day or something. Advantage: You no longer need to fix that leap day bug on your website.
  - dylan604 10mo ago
    would it be better to start the intentional shutdown at say a couple of minutes before midnight so you know the shutdown wasn't perhaps caused by the leap day bug?
- tonyedgecombe 10mo ago
  It would leave most developed countries in chaos, people would die because of it.
  - ema 10mo ago
    Centralized infrastructure is fragile and to the extent that the internet has become centralized unscheduled Internet shutdowns are bound to happen. The benefit of scheduled Internet shutdown is that people can prepare for it while at the same time gaining experience which helps with dealing with an unscheduled Internet shutdown.
    - xmprt 10mo ago
      On the other hand, if we force all systems to be resilient to an internet shutdown then we'd end up regressing society by a lot. Think about how much more work a single doctor is able to handle more efficiently by having internet access (eg. charts, patient history, access to all the world's libraries) that would be lost without the internet.
vivzkestrel 10mo ago
did you see the data i posted earlier on how many shutdowns have happened this year across the world? https://public.tableau.com/app/profile/zach.rosson/viz/STOP_v2/Dashboard1 https://public.tableau.com/app/profile/zach.rosson/viz/STOP_...
- vjay15 10mo ago
  its really crazy how much internet shutdowns india has done
  - crossroadsguy 10mo ago
    India doesn’t do any of this. This is all propaganda by CIA, Ford Foundation, and George Soros. India is the biggest democracy and we had autonomous and conscious flying air-things when the world barely even existed in this form i.e. millennia ago. This is the best UNESCO certified country in the world led by a non-biological (in His own words) head of state. Now, bow! PS. Don’t forget the zero! You still owe us that much.
    - goku12 10mo ago
      I was confused for a minute after reading this, until I remembered that I'm on HN.
ursAxZA 10mo ago
If anything, this just highlights the need for Starlink-style connectivity and off-grid power. Of course, once jamming enters the picture, even that lifeline disappears.
- jedimastert 10mo ago
  > Starlink-style connectivity Note that one of the higher-profile deliberate internet shutdowns was Starlink itself shutting down internet connectivity in Ukraine.
  - ursAxZA 10mo ago
    Ultimately it just becomes a question of where you want the choke point to live — in a state actor, or in a private operator. Neither option is risk-free; the failure modes simply differ. A government can shut you off for political reasons, a corporation can shut you off for contractual or geopolitical ones. As long as the system assumes centralized stewardship for safety or reliability, someone will inevitably hold the switch — the only variable is who.
    - dylan604 10mo ago
      > in a state actor, or in a private operator. multiple satellite operators are coming on line. what are the odds all of them coordinate to shut down in one region invalidating using the other providers as fail over?
      - ursAxZA 10mo ago
        I might be mistaken, but as far as I know there is currently no other LEO broadband provider that is meaningfully comparable at a global scale. Starlink is often treated as the reference point not because it is perfect or fully resilient, but because there is no second network at a similar scale that could realistically serve as a failover today. If we imagine a hypothetical future where three mature operators exist, then yes — absent coordinated political or geopolitical action, at least one network might remain online. However, even that surviving operator would not necessarily provide full coverage of the affected region. Global redundancy is extremely hard in practice, because maintaining continuous, worldwide LEO coverage is not free — it requires massive capex and opex, ground stations, regulatory permissions, and local political approval. True worldwide failover remains more of a theoretical construct than an operational reality.
krautburglar 10mo ago
Worship of the eternal steady-state. Whoever speaks against any intervention to preserve it is a heretic, and must be excommunicated. Whether it’s ML training, pentesting, or old-fashioned engineering, we have to throw the occasional curve-ball at our systems in order to improve them. Surprise internet shutdowns are good, even if the ostensible reasons for them are dumb. Maybe people will host more information offline, and become less dependent on cloud services…
- BLKNSLVR 10mo ago
  > Surprise internet shutdowns are good I'll correct that to: Surprise internet outages are good For the same outcomes though. More and varied methods of contingency.
temptemptemp111 10mo ago
[dead]
BLKNSLVR 10mo ago
Which reminds me that I've let my connection to this group lapse for... about a decade: https://air-stream.org/ https://air-stream.org/ Covering Adelaide, South Australia. Such communities should exist in most cities.
bdcravens 10mo ago
While it may not be practical from a technical perspective, the current US president has suggested shutting down parts of the Internet to ostensibly combat terrorist recruiting. https://time.com/4150891/republican-debate-donald-trump-internet/ https://time.com/4150891/republican-debate-donald-trump-inte...
- A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 10mo ago
  Lets be honest about it. There is no political power on this planet that does not see information flow as a vector that needs to be controlled ( and if they don't, sadly, they likely will not remain in power for long.. ). If true, we are just very lucky, it did not happen sooner. In a weird sense, it helps that corporate interests prevent it.
  - goku12 10mo ago
    > In a weird sense, it helps that corporate interests prevent it. As you may be well aware, Arpanet - the original internet - was designed to be resilient against the deliberate targeting of any of its infrastructure nodes. Of course, it had a military objective. But that design was actually useful to the broader humanity too. We could have sticked to a uniformly resilient multilevel mesh design for the entire internet. I'm sure that many people will object to this notion with multiple potential problems and several anecdotes. This is something that the corporate world always does. They choose and popularize inferior or suboptimal designs that serve their interests and then insist that it is the only way to do it. But we have numerous individual experiments and projects that demonstrate how effective the original mesh design was - bittorrent, wireless meshnets, IPv6 overlay networks, etc. We just had to put enough effort into it to create a singular cohesive resilient network. We inherited the current mess that we call the internet because several layers of it were centralized to satisfy corporate interests. They are responsible for our current predicament in the first place.
    - A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 10mo ago
      You are right. I am not trying to rewrite history, but I also wonder if, had the planners thought the internet would become as big as it is, would they allow it to be as unrestrained as it was at the beginning? << We inherited the current mess that we call the internet because several layers of it were centralized to satisfy corporate interests. They are responsible for our current predicament in the first place. Separately, it does open an interesting question. Right now the push is to centralize, BUT lets speculate if they would push for decentralization if it meant it became useful for a different purpose ( solar system internet -- assuming private space exploration takes off). I wonder if they would try to cooperate vs force 'their' satellite ( I am assuming a lot now ) communication standard.
8bitsrule 10mo ago
According to Gigazine (Osaka, est. 2000), "In 2024, there were 296 internet shutdowns in 54 countries around the world, with Myanmar, India, Pakistan and Russia accounting for about 70% of the total." https://gigazine.net/gsc_news/en/20250228-internet-shutdowns-2024-accessnow/ https://gigazine.net/gsc_news/en/20250228-internet-shutdowns...
ezoe 10mo ago
> In the US, for example, shutdowns would be hard to enforce. Is that really? US government has tanks, bombers, missiles and tactical nukes while "a well regulated Militia" have petty rifles and motolovs. It's very easy for US government to cause state-wide power blackout, effectively shutdown Internet.
- amelius 10mo ago
  Tactical nukes are a big no-go, so don't expect them to be ever used for something like this.
  - goku12 10mo ago
    Oh! You don't need any of those. I'm sure that they have enough tactical EMP devices to do the job. PS: ElectroMagnetic Pulse weapons for the TLA-haters here.
- deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
- immibis 10mo ago
  The US hasn't really won any war for the long term since WW2. It turns out it's hard to change people's opinion by bombing them. Equipment is good at destroying the other sides's factories, and making people afraid of you (though even that's usually done with on-the-ground police boots) but it can't actually make people agree with your side, and in fact, seems to usually have the opposite effect. They can only hold control temporarily as long as they apply massive military pressure. As soon as they let up the pressure, they lose. It probably has something to do with the strict top-down control structure. It's a Linux vs Microsoft situation. Large organisations, regardless of type, cannot innovate.
- Thorrez 10mo ago
  The quote has nothing to do with a well regulated militia. It's about whether the technical ability for internet shutdowns has been built or not. >A country’s ability to shut down the internet depends a lot on its infrastructure. In the US, for example, shutdowns would be hard to enforce. As we saw when discussions about a potential TikTok ban ramped up two years ago, the complex and multifaceted nature of our internet makes it very difficult to achieve. However, as we’ve seen with total nationwide shutdowns around the world, the ripple effects in all aspects of life are immense. (Remember the effects of just a small outage—CrowdStrike in 2024—which crippled 8.5 million computers and cancelled 2,200 flights in the US alone?) >The more centralized the internet infrastructure, the easier it is to implement a shutdown. If a country has just one cellphone provider, or only two fiber optic cables connecting the nation to the rest of the world, shutting them down is easy. Nukes and tanks weren't built for internet shutdowns, and it's a ridiculous idea that if the US government decided to do an internet shutdown that they would decide to use a nuke for that.
hannukahharry 10mo ago
This is concerning in the comments: > I suspect most can guess where this mess will end up, and it’s not good. What I read from this is going to sound conspiratorial, but I think it’s a valid “read between the lines” of an insider. I think they’re saying that they’re alarmed that Silicon Valley is supporting the current U.S. administration assuming he’s doing what’s best for their welfare, while it’s clear based on the activities of Iran and others that are practicing working without internet that they are planning on losing internet, which could either be because Iran, Russia, China, or the U.S. itself may plan to sever or disable internet connections (while unsure what would be isolated or disabled) as an act of war or extreme and dangerously naive nationalism.
g947o 10mo ago
Related: this is an interesting case study https://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/15/world/asia/15china.html https://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/15/world/asia/15china.html
bschne 10mo ago
fun anecdote about Ethiopia doing this to prevent cheating in national exams --- https://x.com/benkuhn/status/1339016975494811649?s=20 https://x.com/benkuhn/status/1339016975494811649?s=20
wereHamster 10mo ago
I just recently learned of Meshtastic (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meshtastic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meshtastic) and MeshCore (https://meshcore.nz/ https://meshcore.nz/), which provide a platform for private and group messaging over P2P LoRa. They don't depend on internet, rely on the community to provide routing nodes, and thus harder to block for governments. It's gaining steam in Europe and can already be used for messaging across wide distances. It's slow though, so forget streaming videos or images. It can only carry messages. But that's often enough to coordinate or spread news.
- gzalo 10mo ago
  The bad part is that it cannot create a world wide mesh, as has a low max hop limit (7), and the nodes need lines of sight. So more than 200 km in a mostly flat city is almost imposible. I wish we had an HF ISM band that could be used for this purposes without needing a license, combined with LoRa radios would yield great results
- alnwlsn 10mo ago
  In my area there are now just enough Meshtastic nodes that I can (somewhat unreliably) talk between my office and home, about 5 miles. However, it does heavily relay on the internet for setup and distribution (app stores, or else lots of pip install, git clone, pnpm install, etc.) I've been working on a virtual machine with all the dependencies preinstalled just so I'll have offline access, and it's surprisingly difficult (though I'm not super familiar with typical webdev stuff). I'd have to think a regular user who really needs to rely on it doesn't stand a chance, which doesn't seem to mesh(ha) that well given how loudly the "off gridness" of it is touted. Then again, you probably need the internet to be able to obtain the hardware in the first place, but that's another problem.
donohoe 10mo ago
Its been happening a lot and its becoming more prevalent. This coverage from 2022 is still highly relevant and digs into some details: https://restofworld.org/2022/blackouts/ https://restofworld.org/2022/blackouts/
sowbug 10mo ago
The recently released One Battle After Another reinforces the impotence of legal rights against a corrupt government entity. In the situations Schneier envisions, corruption will almost certainly be at play.
yoan9224 10mo ago
The normalization of internet shutdowns as a "riot control" tool is deeply concerning, especially given how technically unsophisticated most implementations are. In many cases, governments aren't doing surgical BGP manipulation - they're literally ordering ISPs to turn off infrastructure or block DNS at the national level. This is the equivalent of cutting power to an entire city to stop a protest in one neighborhood. What's particularly insidious is the asymmetry: governments can coordinate offline through military/police radio while citizens lose all communication infrastructure. The $1.5B average economic impact cited in the article is conservative - it doesn't account for destroyed business relationships, lost international contracts, or long-term reputation damage from being seen as "internet shutdown country." The technical countermeasures are evolving but limited. Mesh networks like Briar or Bridgefy work peer-to-peer over Bluetooth but have tiny range. Satellite internet (Starlink) requires hardware that's easy to detect/confiscate. eSIM switching only works if neighboring countries' towers reach across borders. The hardest problem is the "last mile" - even if you can get data out via satellite/mesh, how do you distribute it locally when cellular is down? We need international frameworks treating internet access as critical infrastructure with humanitarian protections, similar to water/electricity during conflicts. The ITU could mandate technical transparency - requiring governments to publicly log shutdown orders with specific geographic/temporal scope rather than blanket national blackouts. That wouldn't prevent shutdowns but would create accountability records.
indigo945 10mo ago
It's strange to read so many countries listed in an article about deliberate internet shutdowns, and even India called out as the world's shutdown capitol, and not one mention of China. Internet shutdowns during important political events, or even just national holidays, are common practice in China, have been for decades, and this is widely known. How is it not China that wins the great prize here?
IceHegel 10mo ago
I’m against internet shutdowns, but I cringe at the phrase “international community.” Who does that even include?
loweritnow 10mo ago
I am going to be the odd one out here and say that internet should be cut off during protests and other unrests. It might even slow down colour revolutions and give the state some breathing space to manage public sentiment.

327 points by WaitWaitWha 10mo ago

kallo 10mo ago

stogot 10mo ago

Its become clear that the axiom “The Net Interprets Censorship As Damage and Routes Around It” as no longer true. It hasnt been since before 2010 anecdotely but the data Schneier presents here is undeniable

cyberax 10mo ago
This is still somewhat true. For example, Russia is now frequently shutting down mobile Internet. Ostensibly for protection against drone attacks, but even it had to relent a bit and allow at least some whitelisted services to work. So immediately local VPN companies started providing the unrestricted access through proxies at these services.
hulitu 10mo ago
It hasn't been true since 9/11 when the US name servers were "shut down" and traffic was dropped ftom level3 nodes.
- stogot 10mo ago
  What name server / level3 event was this?

karel-3d 10mo ago

Ahh I just wanted to host my website in Afghanistan. (there are actual web hosting companies in Kabul, and it seems its not illegal to send money there)

ffuxlpff 10mo ago

One more reason to resist the fragile lifestyle that requires constant internet access. Even if you don't live in a totalitarian country where shutting down the net would be easy and probable. Some time ago someone posted in Twitter a letter of Theodore Kaczynski giving life advice, one point being not to use internet for more than one hour a day. Too bad I couldn't find it anymore.

dijit 10mo ago
why is this flagged? (maybe Theo? I don’t know this person). Its absolutely a good argument against fragile IoT devices that have no local/offline mode and the ever increasing lurch of internet requirements for our daily life. I’m not sure my phone does much of anything without an internet connection. Yet it is my primary banking and authentication method (via BankID). EDIT: Theodore Kaczynski is the unabomber… well, thats an odd name to drop and maybe not an ideal candidate for life advice.
- IAmGraydon 10mo ago
  It's getting downvoted because (1) this person is suggesting the answer to governments taking away our ability to freely communicate is to stop freely communicating (2) he's giving life advice from a terrorist mass murderer. Yes, you're not at risk from being cut off from the world if you're not connected to it in the first place. That's not a state most of us want to exist in. Ted Kaczynski lived in a small cabin in the woods away from humanity.
  - blueflow 10mo ago
    > this person is suggesting the answer to governments taking away our ability to freely communicate is to stop freely communicating You equate comms with internet. Maybe you should talk to people IRL more often.
    - IAmGraydon 10mo ago
      No one in their right mind believes that you can accomplish widespread, high speed communication via "talking to people IRL" like you can with the internet. It has become a very important way that we share information broadly, deal with emergencies, and stay informed. Going back to the stone age is not a good option at this point. But you know that, and you're just posting nonsense to have an argument.

stego-tech 10mo ago

The post is mainly just a CTA against further internet centralization and government control of core infrastructure, which is fine. We need more of these, and we need more examples of their harms for folks to draw on. HN often gets distilled down to a singular cause - EU's Chat Control, Elon's shutdown of Starlink over Ukraine, a regional outage of a public cloud provider - but generalized topics like these aren't really discussed all too often I find, or are often flagged for a variety of reasons and shutdown. As technologists of multiple stripes and disciplines - programmers, developers, engineers, architects, designers, product managers, etcetera - we need to collaborate more on the direction of our industry as a whole, rather than just specific niches we find appealing. From my specific perspective in IT, the increasing centralization across every vendor category (three major x86 server manufacturers, two CPU vendors, two GPU makers, three global-scale public clouds, ISP mono- and duopolies, a handful of commercial operating systems, a near-monopoly EUVL supplier - the list goes on) is a dire threat to not just the open internet, but open technology in general. We need to be better advocates for and champions of the technological future we envision, rather than just blindly celebrate startups and tech fads all the time. Mr. Schneier is merely the latest and largest canary in the proverbial coal mine.

CodingJeebus 10mo ago
It’s hard to be a better advocate without diving into the politics of why we’re in the situation we are, which also doesn’t address the amount of political power you and I have relative to the interests that want said technological consolidation to exist. And given that the tech community trends towards political philosophies like libertarianism, which is inherently anti-organization and anti-collectivist, I’m not sure how you begin to scratch the surface of what a real solution looks like.
- nradov 10mo ago
  Politics are a factor but economics is a bigger one. With any technology, each successive generation inevitably requires larger and larger capital investments. Ideally governments should do more to preserve competition but when it costs >$10B to develop a new microchip manufacturing process that inherently limits how many players the market can support. And if one company bets on the wrong technology or gets the timing wrong that can leave them too financially weak to survive.

modeless 10mo ago

I thought this would be advocating "chaos monkey" style intentional shutdown to test institutions for resiliency in an outage situation. Might not be a bad idea. Maybe once every four years on leap day or something.

flakes 10mo ago
> Maybe once every four years on leap day or something. Advantage: You no longer need to fix that leap day bug on your website.
- dylan604 10mo ago
  would it be better to start the intentional shutdown at say a couple of minutes before midnight so you know the shutdown wasn't perhaps caused by the leap day bug?
tonyedgecombe 10mo ago
It would leave most developed countries in chaos, people would die because of it.
- ema 10mo ago
  Centralized infrastructure is fragile and to the extent that the internet has become centralized unscheduled Internet shutdowns are bound to happen. The benefit of scheduled Internet shutdown is that people can prepare for it while at the same time gaining experience which helps with dealing with an unscheduled Internet shutdown.
  - xmprt 10mo ago
    On the other hand, if we force all systems to be resilient to an internet shutdown then we'd end up regressing society by a lot. Think about how much more work a single doctor is able to handle more efficiently by having internet access (eg. charts, patient history, access to all the world's libraries) that would be lost without the internet.

vivzkestrel 10mo ago

did you see the data i posted earlier on how many shutdowns have happened this year across the world? https://public.tableau.com/app/profile/zach.rosson/viz/STOP_v2/Dashboard1 https://public.tableau.com/app/profile/zach.rosson/viz/STOP_...

vjay15 10mo ago
its really crazy how much internet shutdowns india has done
- crossroadsguy 10mo ago
  India doesn’t do any of this. This is all propaganda by CIA, Ford Foundation, and George Soros. India is the biggest democracy and we had autonomous and conscious flying air-things when the world barely even existed in this form i.e. millennia ago. This is the best UNESCO certified country in the world led by a non-biological (in His own words) head of state. Now, bow! PS. Don’t forget the zero! You still owe us that much.
  - goku12 10mo ago
    I was confused for a minute after reading this, until I remembered that I'm on HN.

ursAxZA 10mo ago

If anything, this just highlights the need for Starlink-style connectivity and off-grid power. Of course, once jamming enters the picture, even that lifeline disappears.

jedimastert 10mo ago
> Starlink-style connectivity Note that one of the higher-profile deliberate internet shutdowns was Starlink itself shutting down internet connectivity in Ukraine.
- ursAxZA 10mo ago
  Ultimately it just becomes a question of where you want the choke point to live — in a state actor, or in a private operator. Neither option is risk-free; the failure modes simply differ. A government can shut you off for political reasons, a corporation can shut you off for contractual or geopolitical ones. As long as the system assumes centralized stewardship for safety or reliability, someone will inevitably hold the switch — the only variable is who.
  - dylan604 10mo ago
    > in a state actor, or in a private operator. multiple satellite operators are coming on line. what are the odds all of them coordinate to shut down in one region invalidating using the other providers as fail over?
    - ursAxZA 10mo ago
      I might be mistaken, but as far as I know there is currently no other LEO broadband provider that is meaningfully comparable at a global scale. Starlink is often treated as the reference point not because it is perfect or fully resilient, but because there is no second network at a similar scale that could realistically serve as a failover today. If we imagine a hypothetical future where three mature operators exist, then yes — absent coordinated political or geopolitical action, at least one network might remain online. However, even that surviving operator would not necessarily provide full coverage of the affected region. Global redundancy is extremely hard in practice, because maintaining continuous, worldwide LEO coverage is not free — it requires massive capex and opex, ground stations, regulatory permissions, and local political approval. True worldwide failover remains more of a theoretical construct than an operational reality.

krautburglar 10mo ago

Worship of the eternal steady-state. Whoever speaks against any intervention to preserve it is a heretic, and must be excommunicated. Whether it’s ML training, pentesting, or old-fashioned engineering, we have to throw the occasional curve-ball at our systems in order to improve them. Surprise internet shutdowns are good, even if the ostensible reasons for them are dumb. Maybe people will host more information offline, and become less dependent on cloud services…

BLKNSLVR 10mo ago
> Surprise internet shutdowns are good I'll correct that to: Surprise internet outages are good For the same outcomes though. More and varied methods of contingency.

temptemptemp111 10mo ago

[dead]

BLKNSLVR 10mo ago

Which reminds me that I've let my connection to this group lapse for... about a decade: https://air-stream.org/ https://air-stream.org/ Covering Adelaide, South Australia. Such communities should exist in most cities.

bdcravens 10mo ago

While it may not be practical from a technical perspective, the current US president has suggested shutting down parts of the Internet to ostensibly combat terrorist recruiting. https://time.com/4150891/republican-debate-donald-trump-internet/ https://time.com/4150891/republican-debate-donald-trump-inte...

A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 10mo ago
Lets be honest about it. There is no political power on this planet that does not see information flow as a vector that needs to be controlled ( and if they don't, sadly, they likely will not remain in power for long.. ). If true, we are just very lucky, it did not happen sooner. In a weird sense, it helps that corporate interests prevent it.
- goku12 10mo ago
  > In a weird sense, it helps that corporate interests prevent it. As you may be well aware, Arpanet - the original internet - was designed to be resilient against the deliberate targeting of any of its infrastructure nodes. Of course, it had a military objective. But that design was actually useful to the broader humanity too. We could have sticked to a uniformly resilient multilevel mesh design for the entire internet. I'm sure that many people will object to this notion with multiple potential problems and several anecdotes. This is something that the corporate world always does. They choose and popularize inferior or suboptimal designs that serve their interests and then insist that it is the only way to do it. But we have numerous individual experiments and projects that demonstrate how effective the original mesh design was - bittorrent, wireless meshnets, IPv6 overlay networks, etc. We just had to put enough effort into it to create a singular cohesive resilient network. We inherited the current mess that we call the internet because several layers of it were centralized to satisfy corporate interests. They are responsible for our current predicament in the first place.
  - A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 10mo ago
    You are right. I am not trying to rewrite history, but I also wonder if, had the planners thought the internet would become as big as it is, would they allow it to be as unrestrained as it was at the beginning? << We inherited the current mess that we call the internet because several layers of it were centralized to satisfy corporate interests. They are responsible for our current predicament in the first place. Separately, it does open an interesting question. Right now the push is to centralize, BUT lets speculate if they would push for decentralization if it meant it became useful for a different purpose ( solar system internet -- assuming private space exploration takes off). I wonder if they would try to cooperate vs force 'their' satellite ( I am assuming a lot now ) communication standard.

8bitsrule 10mo ago

According to Gigazine (Osaka, est. 2000), "In 2024, there were 296 internet shutdowns in 54 countries around the world, with Myanmar, India, Pakistan and Russia accounting for about 70% of the total." https://gigazine.net/gsc_news/en/20250228-internet-shutdowns-2024-accessnow/ https://gigazine.net/gsc_news/en/20250228-internet-shutdowns...

ezoe 10mo ago

> In the US, for example, shutdowns would be hard to enforce. Is that really? US government has tanks, bombers, missiles and tactical nukes while "a well regulated Militia" have petty rifles and motolovs. It's very easy for US government to cause state-wide power blackout, effectively shutdown Internet.

amelius 10mo ago
Tactical nukes are a big no-go, so don't expect them to be ever used for something like this.
- goku12 10mo ago
  Oh! You don't need any of those. I'm sure that they have enough tactical EMP devices to do the job. PS: ElectroMagnetic Pulse weapons for the TLA-haters here.
deleted 10mo ago
[deleted]
immibis 10mo ago
The US hasn't really won any war for the long term since WW2. It turns out it's hard to change people's opinion by bombing them. Equipment is good at destroying the other sides's factories, and making people afraid of you (though even that's usually done with on-the-ground police boots) but it can't actually make people agree with your side, and in fact, seems to usually have the opposite effect. They can only hold control temporarily as long as they apply massive military pressure. As soon as they let up the pressure, they lose. It probably has something to do with the strict top-down control structure. It's a Linux vs Microsoft situation. Large organisations, regardless of type, cannot innovate.
Thorrez 10mo ago
The quote has nothing to do with a well regulated militia. It's about whether the technical ability for internet shutdowns has been built or not. >A country’s ability to shut down the internet depends a lot on its infrastructure. In the US, for example, shutdowns would be hard to enforce. As we saw when discussions about a potential TikTok ban ramped up two years ago, the complex and multifaceted nature of our internet makes it very difficult to achieve. However, as we’ve seen with total nationwide shutdowns around the world, the ripple effects in all aspects of life are immense. (Remember the effects of just a small outage—CrowdStrike in 2024—which crippled 8.5 million computers and cancelled 2,200 flights in the US alone?) >The more centralized the internet infrastructure, the easier it is to implement a shutdown. If a country has just one cellphone provider, or only two fiber optic cables connecting the nation to the rest of the world, shutting them down is easy. Nukes and tanks weren't built for internet shutdowns, and it's a ridiculous idea that if the US government decided to do an internet shutdown that they would decide to use a nuke for that.

hannukahharry 10mo ago

This is concerning in the comments: > I suspect most can guess where this mess will end up, and it’s not good. What I read from this is going to sound conspiratorial, but I think it’s a valid “read between the lines” of an insider. I think they’re saying that they’re alarmed that Silicon Valley is supporting the current U.S. administration assuming he’s doing what’s best for their welfare, while it’s clear based on the activities of Iran and others that are practicing working without internet that they are planning on losing internet, which could either be because Iran, Russia, China, or the U.S. itself may plan to sever or disable internet connections (while unsure what would be isolated or disabled) as an act of war or extreme and dangerously naive nationalism.

g947o 10mo ago

Related: this is an interesting case study https://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/15/world/asia/15china.html https://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/15/world/asia/15china.html

bschne 10mo ago

fun anecdote about Ethiopia doing this to prevent cheating in national exams --- https://x.com/benkuhn/status/1339016975494811649?s=20 https://x.com/benkuhn/status/1339016975494811649?s=20

wereHamster 10mo ago

I just recently learned of Meshtastic (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meshtastic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meshtastic) and MeshCore (https://meshcore.nz/ https://meshcore.nz/), which provide a platform for private and group messaging over P2P LoRa. They don't depend on internet, rely on the community to provide routing nodes, and thus harder to block for governments. It's gaining steam in Europe and can already be used for messaging across wide distances. It's slow though, so forget streaming videos or images. It can only carry messages. But that's often enough to coordinate or spread news.

gzalo 10mo ago
The bad part is that it cannot create a world wide mesh, as has a low max hop limit (7), and the nodes need lines of sight. So more than 200 km in a mostly flat city is almost imposible. I wish we had an HF ISM band that could be used for this purposes without needing a license, combined with LoRa radios would yield great results
alnwlsn 10mo ago
In my area there are now just enough Meshtastic nodes that I can (somewhat unreliably) talk between my office and home, about 5 miles. However, it does heavily relay on the internet for setup and distribution (app stores, or else lots of pip install, git clone, pnpm install, etc.) I've been working on a virtual machine with all the dependencies preinstalled just so I'll have offline access, and it's surprisingly difficult (though I'm not super familiar with typical webdev stuff). I'd have to think a regular user who really needs to rely on it doesn't stand a chance, which doesn't seem to mesh(ha) that well given how loudly the "off gridness" of it is touted. Then again, you probably need the internet to be able to obtain the hardware in the first place, but that's another problem.

donohoe 10mo ago

Its been happening a lot and its becoming more prevalent. This coverage from 2022 is still highly relevant and digs into some details: https://restofworld.org/2022/blackouts/ https://restofworld.org/2022/blackouts/

sowbug 10mo ago

The recently released One Battle After Another reinforces the impotence of legal rights against a corrupt government entity. In the situations Schneier envisions, corruption will almost certainly be at play.

yoan9224 10mo ago

The normalization of internet shutdowns as a "riot control" tool is deeply concerning, especially given how technically unsophisticated most implementations are. In many cases, governments aren't doing surgical BGP manipulation - they're literally ordering ISPs to turn off infrastructure or block DNS at the national level. This is the equivalent of cutting power to an entire city to stop a protest in one neighborhood. What's particularly insidious is the asymmetry: governments can coordinate offline through military/police radio while citizens lose all communication infrastructure. The $1.5B average economic impact cited in the article is conservative - it doesn't account for destroyed business relationships, lost international contracts, or long-term reputation damage from being seen as "internet shutdown country." The technical countermeasures are evolving but limited. Mesh networks like Briar or Bridgefy work peer-to-peer over Bluetooth but have tiny range. Satellite internet (Starlink) requires hardware that's easy to detect/confiscate. eSIM switching only works if neighboring countries' towers reach across borders. The hardest problem is the "last mile" - even if you can get data out via satellite/mesh, how do you distribute it locally when cellular is down? We need international frameworks treating internet access as critical infrastructure with humanitarian protections, similar to water/electricity during conflicts. The ITU could mandate technical transparency - requiring governments to publicly log shutdown orders with specific geographic/temporal scope rather than blanket national blackouts. That wouldn't prevent shutdowns but would create accountability records.

indigo945 10mo ago

It's strange to read so many countries listed in an article about deliberate internet shutdowns, and even India called out as the world's shutdown capitol, and not one mention of China. Internet shutdowns during important political events, or even just national holidays, are common practice in China, have been for decades, and this is widely known. How is it not China that wins the great prize here?

IceHegel 10mo ago

I’m against internet shutdowns, but I cringe at the phrase “international community.” Who does that even include?

loweritnow 10mo ago

I am going to be the odd one out here and say that internet should be cut off during protests and other unrests. It might even slow down colour revolutions and give the state some breathing space to manage public sentiment.