6d ago

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

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?

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The internet was originally designed to withstand nuclear war, so that a functioning military network could coordinate a retaliation quickly.
The network protocols themselves are self-healing, routing around failures, very resilient.
The internet itself, even today, is incredibly difficult to destroy. It is nearly impossible to take it down.
However, the internet that most people think of as the internet, Facebook Google etc. Are centralized services that are trivial to take down.
Peer to peer protocols like email, torrents, are also nearly impossible to take down.
The examples of Russia and China isolating themselves, are different. That's the network designers isolating the network. It's not a third party trying to destroy the network.
- China's Internet is basically just a vpn
  
  Well, its not virtual. so its a PN
  
  It's not private either, so an N
  
  But it's local to China, so it's a LAN.
  
  Chins is locally wide, so it's a LWAN
- Wait, email is p2p?
  
  Yes, mostly. It's distributed and federated. Peer to peer at the email server level
  Domain A users can message domain B users directly without going to any other domain.
  Fun fact email can also handle variable availability networks and use forwarding agents to get a message through even indirectly (though most people don't configure this anymore, in the days of dialup this was more common)
  
  I see. Thanks for clarifying!

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