Sounds silly of course, and it is silly. But I thought it would be interesting to think it through. And with multiple minds.
How do you go about “turning off the internet” for a particular country? Because this is being attributed to Trump, I’m presuming that “turn off the internet” could mean a number of things.
Mess with DNS? Disable infrastructure? Buy out telecom?
Let’s say we’re committed to this task, how do we go about it? Let’s hear the crazy ideas
The “Internet” isn’t actually a thing. You can disrupt large portions of computer interconnectivity by targeting popular service providers and the larger traffic hubs. Because there is no central junction or single vendor or provider it isn’t really something that can be completely shut off in one brush stroke. Note that television and voice calls and all money uses the same infrastructure. Selectively shutting off somethings and not others would be even harder.
Setting aside that making sense of things Trump suggests is pointless: one method would be a blanket order that telecom providers turn off access in a targeted area. I expect in America some portion of people would still figure out how to get connectivity, but cutting off 80% of internet access would still be very disruptive.
This is where I was leaning when thinking about it initially. It would almost have to be a non-technical solution. I’m guessing he’s more of an “internet for me, but not for thee” kind of turn-off-the-internet guy so infrastructure and service would need to operate on some level
Devil in the details, as with all things he says…
If we redefined what “turn off” means, and make it more like “no access to internet” the end result of turning off the internet is achieved.
So far, forcing telcos into action might be the most applicable? They can pick and choose services to disable I assume