Why did people in the 90s/early 00s say that the internet "couldn't be taken down"? - eviltoast

Or am I the only one remembering this opinion? I felt like it was common for people to say that the internet couldn’t be taken down, or censored or whatever. This has obviously been proven false with the Great Firewall of China, and of Russia’s latest attempts of completely disconnecting from the global internet. Where did this idea come from?

  • Kelly@lemmy.world
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    4 days ago

    “The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.”

    As an example of this, one of the easiest and most performant methods a nation has of blocking a website is dictating which DNS records its ISPs return for domains.

    This has the advantages that it doesn’t require traffic inspection and doesn’t slow traffic at all.

    But it has the disadvantages that it has an all-or-none effect on the domain e.g. it can’t be used to bock specific pages.

    It can also be bypassed by simply using an international DNS server. There are people bypassing this kind of censorship without even knowing they are doing so.