Seven people own the keys to switch off the internet.

[Misanthrope]

Helloween predicted this in the 80s!

[ivhyn]

Seven rings to rule them all, seven rings to find them,
seven rings to bring them all and in the darkness bind them

[Yoinkerman]

It'll just make any computer unable to access absolutely anywhere on the internet. Icann runs the top top level dns servers that can access anywhere. Other places have their own dns servers that can access a lot of places too.

It'd be more like if planes suddenly didn't work. You could still get around your continent pretty easily, but getting to Europe from NA is suddenly much more difficult.

[kuddlesworth9419]

I doubt anyone even knows how to turn off the internet any more. It's like a giant monster that has gotten too big for any single individual person or country. But it's our little monster and we love it.

[sysloc]

How to avoid problems: get all websites with links to change the links from a URL to a number IP. Voila!

[ijKs Snow]

lololol

[Kev]

Why bother with all this? Why would you need to turn off the internet? Maybe some sort of hyper virus or mega huge DDOS?

[wpirobotbuilder]

I now know how to hold the world for ransom

Great, it'll be like the early 2000's when DDoS was becoming a thing, and financial institutions were being held for ransom.

[ijKs Snow]

Why bother with all this? Why would you need to turn off the internet? Maybe some sort of hyper virus or mega huge DDOS?

It's probably a traditional policy issue. Since ICANN was founded in 1998 when the internet wasn't nearly as big as today. They probably wanted some sort of control over it in one of those "just in case" situations.

[Ciccioo]

(ICANN does not own DNSs ----> nobody has the power to cause a DNS catastrophe on its own)

 

(i feel bad for having to point this out, that there is no ILLUMINATI or similars)

(i feel so bad that i have to write whispering in brackets)

[StingBull]

Sooo, which one of them has the key to the porn section of the net?

[HK_Rage]

That makes you think though, what kind of situation would require a complete shutdown of the internet. Shutting it down would cause a massive wave of problems along side the other issues that caused it to be shutdown.

[Kamina]

I thought the internet was controlled by one giant modem. 

[Prophet of Entropy]

i'm not too worried about a system originally designed to survive a nuclear war being irrevocably damaged.  people would panic, but when do people not panic and make things worse?