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In theory yes, however, in pratical terms you just need to "bomb" the right places and 90% of the communications would be gone for quite a while. Think PIX and DNS root servers, destroy those, and only minor services would be available. There are countries with a single PIX, sitting in regular rooms without any kind of security, unplug those and the whole country would be offline (to be fair, intra-ISP traffic would work). And there's no need to go that far (bombing places), a bad actor that can cut some submarine fiber in the right places would cripple the whole world. Or just someone messing up BGP config in a big ISP, no need to bomb or destroy anything, a single bad command can cause major issues worldwide (had happened before).


The Internet as it is now is structured to maximize the profits of the Internet service providers.

This results in a structure very different from what was conceived originally for the purpose of being resilient to partial destruction.

For the latter purpose, the best structure is a decentralized mesh with mostly equivalent links, which is much less economical than what the Internet uses now, i.e. a hierarchy of links of increasing throughputs that concentrates the traffic into few very high-speed links that pass through central high-capacity routers, so that the parts of the network where most of the traffic is concentrated are very vulnerable and their destruction would affect everybody.




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