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Why did people in the 90s/early 00s say that the internet "couldn't be taken down"?
(lemmy.dbzer0.com)
this post was submitted on 17 Dec 2024
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That applied a whole lot more when most connections were using a phone line, and a decent size city could have hundreds of ISPs. But part of the design of a redundant mesh network is that there are tons of different paths to any destination. Cutting any of those links would simply force traffic to other routes.
The early Internet was decentralized in other ways, too. Rather than flock to corporate platforms like Facebook, people spent a lot of time on federated and independent platforms. This included Usenet, IRC, and BBSes. In the event that the feds, lawyers, etc could take one down, a dozen more could spring up overnight. There was such a small barrier to entry, and many were run by hobbyists.
It's somewhat true today. There are countless Lemmy instances that are completely independent. Pirate Bay famously references the Hydra, and it applies to their peers as well. But these are limited in scope.
Xitter has shown us just how quickly and thoroughly a platform can collapse through hostile admins, and how slowly people will reject it.
As an example of this, one of the easiest and most performant methods a nation has of blocking a website is dictating which DNS records its ISPs return for domains.
This has the advantages that it doesn't require traffic inspection and doesn't slow traffic at all.
But it has the disadvantages that it has an all-or-none effect on the domain e.g. it can't be used to bock specific pages.
It can also be bypassed by simply using an international DNS server. There are people bypassing this kind of censorship without even knowing they are doing so.