Cutting off internet access isn’t as easy as flipping a switch.
. That’s because cutting off internet access to the outside world isn’t as simple as flipping a switch. Rather, it involves isolating connections to the outside internet at a small number of designated transit points within a country and then either blocking traffic at those points or announcing to outside routers that pass traffic from international servers into the country in question that that traffic can no longer be delivered to the intended recipients.
Any individual government’s ability to cut off internet access depends on the particular architecture of the network infrastructure within theirIn Iran, the government appeared to use a combination of these tactics to prevent outside traffic from entering the country. Some of Iran’s internet service providers simply blocked incoming traffic while others stopped announcing to outside servers that they could deliver traffic to Iranian IP addresses.
Iran doesn’t have a huge number of service providers, so cutting off internet access took some time but, ultimately, was doable. For other countries, with fewer providers and fewer connections to the global internet, a kill switch can be even simpler to implement. Acategorized countries according to how difficult it would be to disconnect them from the internet, based primarily on how many internet service providers in these countries had connections to international, external networks.
That analysis is now 7 years old. Since then, the quantity of internet providers in many countries and overall architecture of the global internet has developed considerably, largely in the direction of more global interconnection and therefore greater resistance to shutdowns.
The efforts of Iran, Russia, and other countries to isolate and disconnect their portion of the internet from the rest of the world highlight just how much any individual government’s ability to cut off internet access depends on the particular architecture of the network infrastructure within its borders.
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