How fragile is the internet? Could it ever dissappear?
In: Technology
The two things that make the Internet the Internet:
1. A common set of communication protocols – IP/IPv6, TCP/UDP, HTTP, et al, as well as routing protocols such as BGP.
2. A system of unique addressing of network elements and domain names, all administered by various parts of ICANN
You can run a data network on protocols that aren’t IP/IPv6, but it won’t talk to anything else on the internet. You can also do your own IP addressing and domain name scheme – hell, you can create DNS for [google.com](http://google.com) on your own isolated network – but it’s not going to interact with the rest of the Internet.
So, as long as the protocol is stable, and those registries – which are highly distributed to ensure their stability – exist, the internet will never “disappear” in an existential sense.
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