Ah...the perennial "shut down the internet" meme.

Comes around, like a case of Herpes, when you least expect it. I'd expect the "email postage" meme to come along soon.

So, how do you shut down the Internet, exactly? Do you go to a building on "i" street and Washington DC and throw a switch? Nope.

Do you cut a cable that connect the USA to the rest of the world? Nope.

Do you force every mobile phone system to shut off 3G and Edge data services? Nope.

This is the kind of a bill that comes from technologically illiterate thinking by old farts like Ted "Series of Tubes" Stevens and his aged ilk. They think the internet is a mainframe somewhere. It's not, it never was, it can't be that, it does not work that way..

They simple can't conceptualize what a decentralized, open system is like - and how with a laptop and a wifi base stations and a few cables and gizmos, I could re-enable limited internet within an urban area in a matter of minutes. Let's not even go into how mesh networks & P2P simply bypass ALL central systems (look at the One Laptop Per Child program for more on Meshed systems).

There's much bigger things to fear than some dumb-butt bill that is as rational as a bill outlawing hamburgers.

At the moment, I think we might have some folks in Iraq who get no attention from our media, right now we have people hungry and homeless in America, right now we have millions unemployed, right now we have a barely functional national rail system, right now we have a nation that is about to lose one, and possibly two of the big car makers. All of these are real issues, and this bs about "shutting down the internet" is nonsensical.

That said, if I have a particular data center that's a problem or a particular fiber optic cable that's a problem, of course I want that offline.