The US telecommunication system, highly integrated across media and platforms, with many redundant paths to get virtually anywhere, would be much harder to control.
Not really, there are only around 7 fibre backbone circuit carrier providers in the USA.
http://navigators.com/internet_architecture.html#ISP_BackboneEven taking out a few of the major telecoms players using Emergency powers legislation would basically make normal Internet (as folks now expect to use there computers for email, messaging, social networking etc) usage virtually unworkable.
There are around 30-50 submarine cables operating from maybe a dozen geographical location nodes.
http://www.verizonbusiness.com/ca/about/network/maps/map.xmlDisabling these cables (physically just a few axe blows in the right places) would turn off a huge amount of the worlds Internet traffic running from the USA to Europe, Asia and central and South America. This would effectively isolate the USA from the rest of the world.
http://listicles.thelmagazine.com/wp-content/upload/webmap07-telegeography.jpghttp://www.chrisharrison.net/projects/InternetMap/medium/worldBlack.jpgInternal Internet network traffic within the USA would be effected just by pulling the plug on the backbone fibre main switch node centres.
The DHS know where the vulnerabilities are located to kill the Internet in the USA, if they did not then how can they protect those vulnerabilities from Terrorist and Cyber attack (i.e. the old fashioned Spetznaz with their sharp edged shovels)
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