Internet Destruction (Semi-RAR)

[Eternal_Freedom]

Inspired in part by the SOPA thread and the South Park episode "Over-Logging."

Let us suppose that due to some unknown reason (perhaps some kind of self-developed AI or somesuch) the Internet just stops. As of a certain time (call it 0000 UTC, January 1st 2012) the Internet no longer functions.

No traffic, no packets zooming about, nothing.

What would happen to the world?

(NB to mods, if this is better suited to another forum, please move as you see fit).

[CaptainChewbacca]

I believe the world economy would collapse. None of the millions of things that are bought and paid for every day would be sold or shipped, currency values would start to become untethered leading to further instability. Communications networks would crash as everyone on earth dialed their phone to find out what happened to their email.

I believe many portable GPS devices function in some capacity through the internet, so those would also stop working. Most significantly, though, millions of adorable cats would be photographed in anonymity without appreciation.

A future I don't want to think about.

[Sea Skimmer]

The power grid in most countries would fail, that alone would take care of the economy.

[Zaune]

Unless this took the form of every server, hub, switch and cable in the world spontaneously combusting or turning into pineapple custard I should think it would cause a considerable amount of inconvenience and financial loss but be ultimately survivable. Every ISP in the world would blow through its entire overtime budget for a year in a couple of months jury-rigging a slow and flaky but serviceable solution. The world economy would undoubtedly take a nasty knock in the interim, but essential services would probably be able to muddle through with the backup methods they use every time their high-tech but low-bidder equipment decides to go tits up on them.

[Number Theoretic]

I believe the Internet can take and survive a big punch on its main infrastructure. Sure, it would cripple all major routes but not all of them. After all, the original APRAnet on which most internet technology is based on was intended to be resilient to nuclear strikes against its backbone infrastructure and much of that reasoning can still be seen if you take a close look at the IP protocol.

And then, there are still other communication networks which are at best only loosely coupled to the Internet or could fuction easily without its infrastructure, such as Netsukuku, the Freifunk communities or any other ad-hoc network based on OSI-Layer-2-technologies such as B.A.T.M.A.N.
Other examples include short-wave ham radio, the "classic" telephone network and perhaps the cellphone network.

[Bedlam]

I remember reading an acticle stating that although the internet is resistant is point distruction its less resilient than APRAnet was designed to be as its has grown more hapasardly that originally invisioned and is no longer designed to be able to surive such an attack.

[Simon_Jester]

It depends on mechanism. We get different results from "all computers are physically intact, but unable to communicate with each other because a wizard did it" than we do from "all computers melt into puddles of goo, take THAT Internet!"

[K. A. Pital]

Russian power grids are not internet-dependendent. I'm not sure any powerplants require the internet to function.

[Sea Skimmer]

Well nobodies power plants strictly need the internet to function, what needs the internet to function are the systems that control grid voltage in real time. Take way control and you'll get a massive cascading blackout like the one in the US North east in 2003, except it will affect everything in one go. The less the unified Russian grid might not need that for all its girds, but I'd be impressed if the more highly integrated parts in western Russian that are feeding power into a dozen other countries right now haven't been put online. In the long term the older style of control systems that operated through coded links in the power lines themselves could be restored, but even a few weeks without power would be disastrous. Some of the current systems actually still use the power lines as part of the data network, but its still effectively internet based. In the interim the best that could be done would be to operate certain very specific pieces of load and supplier on closed grids controlled more or less over the phone but that's not going to work very well in dense areas. Plus, a lot of the worlds phone systems work off shared infrastructure with the internet now...

On the plus side, internet servers consume massive amounts of power, so the total grid load would be a lot less; though server load is also I suspect relatively static and static loads aren't the troublesome ones. 100 million people coming home in the span of an hour to turn on TVs, washing machines ect... is the problem.

[Skgoa]

Oh, I just remembered: the german national railway has started sending it's junctions and signals settings over the internet. (Well, they own the fiber cables running under the tracks, but functionally it's the internet.)

[Simon_Jester]

Another interesting question for this RAR is what counts as part of the Internet. If I have a LAN that runs on hardware which is all physically located in my building, but I can use the computers on the LAN to access the Internet, do the LAN connections break along with the rest of the Internet?

[Eternal_Freedom]

No, LAN networks remain operational, but only as either a physical link with cables or short-range (~20 metres) wireless system.

[someone_else]

Well nobodies power plants strictly need the internet to function, what needs the internet to function are the systems that control grid voltage in real time. Take way control and you'll get a massive cascading blackout like the one in the US North east in 2003, except it will affect everything in one go. The less the unified Russian grid might not need that for all its girds, but I'd be impressed if the more highly integrated parts in western Russian that are feeding power into a dozen other countries right now haven't been put online. In the long term the older style of control systems that operated through coded links in the power lines themselves could be restored, but even a few weeks without power would be disastrous. Some of the current systems actually still use the power lines as part of the data network, but its still effectively internet based. In the interim the best that could be done would be to operate certain very specific pieces of load and supplier on closed grids controlled more or less over the phone but that's not going to work very well in dense areas. Plus, a lot of the worlds phone systems work off shared infrastructure with the internet now...

What about a satellite uplink like those for two-way satellite internet access?
The systems aren't horribly expensive unless you need multiple megabits/s of bandwith, and even then it's not really an issue for a power plant that is necessary for the nation. And they take a few hours to mount and go online (after you found who sells them anyway).

Although it depends from how the sat relays work. If they need ground infrastructure (that get magically screwed for this RAR) to work you're fucked anyway.

[Skgoa]

No, LAN networks remain operational, but only as either a physical link with cables or short-range (~20 metres) wireless system.

So, all globally routed IPv4 networks are affected, then? Hm... semi-plausible scenario: some Evil Overlord takes over Google, AWS et.al. and just spams *.*.*.* with gigabyte sized ping packets. As a result, everyone switches off their routers to wait it out. Depending on how fast law enforcement could get a sufficient portion of data centers under control, this could actually effectively shut down the internet for a while. Long enough to get power plants and railways into trouble.

[Zaune]

So, all globally routed IPv4 networks are affected, then? Hm... semi-plausible scenario: some Evil Overlord takes over Google, AWS et.al. and just spams *.*.*.* with gigabyte sized ping packets. As a result, everyone switches off their routers to wait it out. Depending on how fast law enforcement could get a sufficient portion of data centers under control, this could actually effectively shut down the internet for a while. Long enough to get power plants and railways into trouble.

Depending how you define "a while", I have thought it'd actually be the other way around, with the worst disruption happening in the first 12 to 72 hours while everyone was working out contingency plans. And power plants and railways are actually two institutions I'd expect to be among the more resilient, even in this post-regulatory day and age; any company for whom the loss of Internet service comes with the potential for equipment damage and wrongful-death lawsuits as well as lost revenue has probably given plenty of thought to coping with an outage in the short term.

[Skgoa]

TBH I was thinking more of a 6 to 24 hours time frame to get most of the internet back online. But that's enough time to severely impact the opperation of these incredibly complex and distributed systems like the power grid or railways. Now, this would most propably not result in power plants exploding and trains runing into each other. Itwill result in diminished quality of service and higher risk, though. Power plants can't risk putting all of their generatiing cappacity on the grid without real time updates, so they won't be able to react to increases in demand, i.e. power outages. The german national railway would have to sent people out within one hour to set junctions and signals manually - high speed rail would be constricted to "regular speed" for the duration of the attack.

And I just had another epiphany: there is so much commercial internet traffic (esp. banking) that entire industries rely on. If the attackers timed it right, they could wreak havoc on the markets by making mutially exclusive deals. You would have to have insiders in the big investment banks, but since we are outside of realistic already...