What Would Happen If the Whole Internet Just Shut Down All of a Sudden? (via kenyatta)Larry Page once said that ‘Google would be building airports and cities’. It has long been believed that the influence of digital actors will remain confined to software, dematerialized content and information. It starts to be clear that they are using their mastery in these areas to take positions in non-digital markets, be it transport, infrastructure management or banking. Google may not be building cities yet but, directly or through its investments, it is already playing a role as a mobility organizer, while IBM participates in the management of water supply infrastructure in several cities.
With the ever-increasing connection of infrastructures and objects, the organization of physical flows requires the control of information flows. A global Internet shutdown is likely to have extremely important consequences for a world that will still be physical, but deeply driven and structured by information and data.
That being said, moving from the thought experiment to the actual functioning of the Internet today, it has to be mentioned that it is extremely unlikely that a global Internet shutdown actually happens. While it is relatively easy to shut down specific parts of the internet for some period of time—as it is well documented here—a global one is, at least so far, almost impossible, due to the distributed and interconnected nature of the Internet
(via kenyatta)