Can I turn off the entire Internet?
The global system consists of millions of computers, each of which invests in the information web space a piece of information located on it. It is known that the network of these devices is scattered around the world. Almost every country has a web server that provides its share of the development of the global information base. It is not a secret that special devices are officially allocated to provide control and “mapping” of access to these servers. The task of these particular machines is to manage the addressing of Internet resources. But how much does the Internet depend on these “computational bosses”?
One day, one person, by the name of Paul Mokapetris, came up with a system that simplifies working with network addresses and called it the domain name system. The essence of this idea was as follows. When requesting the address of a website, the user’s computer should contact the DNS server assigned to it through the provider. If this server does not find the necessary information about the address, it redirects the request to a higher level DNS server and so on until the request command reaches some root servers. Root machines store information about the presence of higher level domains in the network, because: COM, ORG, NET, RU, etc.
We can say about them that these are “titans” on which the whole space of Internet names is kept as we can see it. Without these global Internet sites, accessing sites would be much less convenient. Thanks to them, users have the opportunity to type in their browsers simple (well, maybe not always simple) site addresses instead of their direct IP addresses.
Imagine that for the place of easily remembered yandex.ru you would have to type in the address bar of the browser: “87.250.251.11”. Such addresses would not be easy to remember. DNS or domain name system is a kind of global Internet directory. As soon as a user requests a specific Internet address from a computer or any device, the DNS server automatically finds in its database the corresponding IP address of this site, through which it connects to the correct host. Substitution of a symbolic address with an IP address at the same time occurs unnoticed by the user.
Today in the world there are 13 root servers distributed throughout the world, which store the base of names for all the resources of the global network. It turns out that the entire domain system is decentralized at first glance, and therefore minimally vulnerable. Servers with site names are spread across different countries and continents, with the exception of four of them, which are concentrated in almost one place in the state of California, and hence in a single state.
The US Congress has repeatedly made attempts to take control of this system within the framework of its state. The act of protecting cyberspace promoted by Congress provides the right in the event of a threat to national security to terminate the work of jurisdictional DNS servers, which can lead to a sufficiently significant restriction of access to many sites. What part of the Internet will become inaccessible at the Internet will , and what the consequences of such a shutdown can only be guessed at.
