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Ask HN: If the Internet goes dark what do we do?

2 points by joshuak ↗ HN
This S3 outage has got me thinking. What if there was a full out Internet war (or some other cause), and for some period of time the Internet was down for everyone[1]. What's the plan? Should we meet at the place near the thing where we went that time?

I mean what should we do to coordinate and keep informed? TVs might be down if they are bound to an Internet service. Radio? Do we try to stay off of limited services to leave bandwidth to emergency services? Has anyone given this serious thought (I haven't)?

[1]: Limited in scope to whatever seems plausible to you, don't get lost in the how, I'm asking about the reaction to an un-known event.

3 comments

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cmatthieu
We need a distributed web alternative ~ perhaps built on IPFS with maybe blockchain-based DNS...
davelnewton
I don't understand why radio wouldn't be the absolute first option. It's also not clear if you're assuming cel service is also out.

The canonical answer is radio, professional and ham. There are entire events dedicated to amateur radio emergency responses.

okket
To reinforce your point: The main issue is that the Internet converges to a monopoly of a handful players which control almost everything. The hard evidence for this trend is major international carriers are retreating, while Google, Facebook and Amazon are investing in privately owned undersea cables to sync their content distribution data centres.

In a weird coincidence earlier today, Geoff Huston gave an insightful talk about how these companies are reshaping the Internet:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FI7rRfNI8u4&t=46m17s