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Is there really an Internet Kill Switch?

By Salehuddin Bin Husin - on 10 Dec 2015, 10:46am

Is there really an Internet Kill Switch?

Is shutting down the internet simply a matter of hitting a button?

Donald Trump recently made news in the US when he mentioned that one of his ideas to stop online recruitment by terrorist groups was to shut down the internet somehow. We don't think Donald Trump truly understands how the internet works but it did get us thinking if it was possible to create a single master switch that would cut off all internet access in a localized area.

We've known that it was possible to shut down widespread internet access in a country; the riots in Egypt in 2011 certainly proved that. But did the Egyptian government do it with the push of a single big red button?

The answer is no. There's no magic button (that we know off) that the Egyptian government used to take out internet access in the control. It doesn't even exist in the US, despite various proposals trying their hardest to establish its creation.

Now that we know that there's no magic button, how exactly does one take out internet access in a country?

The answer is simple and very anticlimactic. You go right to the source. The source (or in this case, sources) are the ISPs. The Egyptian government simply made the ISPs in the country change lines in their code that blocked internet access to the whole country. 

While we can't conclusively say that a button to kill the internet doesn't exist (for all we know North Korea might have one), for now, most governments have to do it the hard way.

Sources: Forbes, MaximumPC, Daily Mail UK

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