Does the US "own" the internet?

I was reading the thread about the possibility the USA might shut down the internet in case of an emergency.

A couple questions, is this even possible? I thought the internet was worldwide, with servers in several countries. How could it be shut down?

Second, does the US own the internet? I know it started here, but does that mean we technically own it?

Thanks for the answers in advance. I'm not much of a high tech person so its why I have these questions.

...didn't want to brag about it around here cuz folks might think I wuz one of them upper-crusters or sumpin. I bought it from some guy in Nigeria last year. He sent me a letter saying he could get it fer me cheap and all I had to do wuz send him a money order. I aint stupid, so I haggled him down to $150. Can you believe I suckered that feller so bad! Ha ha ha! I aint sellin it either!

we all know that Al Gore owns it since he invented it

sheesh!

:bounce:

...shutting off all traffic into and out of the country or doing that and shutting down routers around the country so that even intra-country traffic would not be able to route correctly. How exactly they would even do this if they wanted to is a bit of a question mark. For isntance, I have QWest. Well, if the U.S. "shuts down" the internet, I could still almost certainly communicate with people on QWest's network, which is expansive. To actually "shut it all down" it would require having kill switches at major ISP's- hell even minor ISP's. It's absolutely idiotic. Because we have an astounding amount of ways to communicate, it's not quite as easy as some in the government think it would be to actually "shut down" the internet. It's not like they toss a satchel charge into the Ineternet Tunnel and blow it up to seal it off.

The Free World would's internet not be affected. You can learn a bit more by looking up how DNS and BGP (if I recall correctly) work. Boring stuff, but it will help you understand more.

PB

...don't they mean that they've given the President power in an emergency (not sure who decides it's gotten to that point) where government networks and those of big businesses that could be under attack would be shut down to 'protect' them?

...easily disconnect themselves from the internet if they need or want to. What I don't get is why the government wants to, ya know, have their finger on the button. It's not like the government is going to be any more adept than the network administrators who work for a large corporation.

And BTW, :hi:

PB

I suspect with the big business side of it, it's the idea of having power. When it comes to government, no-one in their right mind would hit that big red button they have to turn off their website without them being ordered to by the Big Big Boss...

Great to see you again, PB!

:hi:

hit the "kill switch". nt

Preventing the shutdown of communications is built into the design of the system.

Considering all of the commerce that is handled by the Internet, it seems likely that shutting down even a portion of the Internet would quickly crash the economy.

Since international commerce would also be seriously affected, shutting down the Internet would be equivalent to an embargo against other countries, and an embargo amounts to an act of war.

Anyone who threatens to shut down the Internet is insane.