Or am I the only one remembering this opinion? I felt like it was common for people to say that the internet couldn’t be taken down, or censored or whatever. This has obviously been proven false with the Great Firewall of China, and of Russia’s latest attempts of completely disconnecting from the global internet. Where did this idea come from?
This is also due to the size of traffic these days.
Originaly (if we say, take early html as a starting point) it was mostly text, then later a few images.
These days a simple webpage needs large amounts of code and data just to load. So packets having to get to you in a roundabout way doesn’t just make the page take a little longer to load, it will most likely break the page.
But the infrastructure and ways of communication is really hard to take down and except for the few nations that have complete control over their own network, it is nearly impossible to break down communication completely. You would just need to rely on simpler data structures.
As others have stated fewer isp’s and core infrastructure providers do make the global network a bit more vulnerable today. And sites and services that lots of people consider “the internet” can be (at least for a while) taken down/offline.