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?
There is a lot of confused misinterpretation in this thread. “Can’t be taken down” was a thing, but it was about how you can lose big chunks of the network and have the rest of it still work. That was misinterpreted at the time, in fairness, and it’s even less true now, where centralization in both the infrastructure and the hosting have a lot of things dropping at once and being disrupted, but it’s still technically true. Ukrainian drones are out there beaming up to satellite internet and being used in active warfare in the middle of a battlefield. Which hey, in that context, robust military communication was the original intent of the network to begin with. Given the previous baseline is wired telephone, the characterization isn’t that far off.
Censorship is different, but also true. You can isolate a chunk of the Internet, and once you’ve done that if you have very centralized control you can monitor it, but that’s a high bar. And of course outside of those cases people struggle to limit communications they don’t want, from nazi chatter to piracy.
At the time I used to think that was a good thing, now… yeah, harder to justify. Turns out “free information” didn’t automatically make everyone smarter. I have lots of apologies to give to teachers and professors of theory of communication that were trying to explain this to us in the 90s and we were all “nah, man, their only crime was curiosity, hack the planet, free the information” and all that.