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?

  • Captain Aggravated@sh.itjust.works
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    3 days ago

    The basic building blocks of the internet were designed by DARPA, and it was designed with that military mentality of “If the ruskies nuke any part of our infrastructure, the rest of it should keep running.” You can chop large parts of the internet off and those parts stop working but the rest of it keeps going. Here’s an extreme example: I can unplug my cable modem and disconnect my house from the internet completely, yet I can still access the web pages hosted by my switch, Wi-Fi router and NAS through my local area network.

    • Phoenixz@lemmy.ca
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      3 days ago

      Mind you that a lotmof that no longer works

      In the past traffic could be routed over whatever. If one node went down, the traffic would go over another

      Now we have a few very fast backbones and if even one goes down bye bye internet

      What you have cached locally or on your doesn’t count because it’s only that which you’ve seen before.