The US apparently has the power to switch off the Internet if it ever comes under serious cyber attack. A Senate bill (seems to have slipped under the rug a little) Allows the Federal government the authority to shut down the Internet in times of declared emergency, and enables unprecedented federal oversight of private network administration. The bill's draft states that "the president may order a cybersecurity emergency and order the shutdown of Internet traffic" and would give the government ongoing access to "all relevant data concerning networks without regard to any provision of law, regulation, rule, or policy restricting such access.
The White House has not officially endorsed the draft law, but it apparently helped write it, according to the Washington Post. The drafts author states that it will protect the cybersecurity of the private sector in a time of crisis. The US government is worried about America's vulnerability to massive cyber-crime, global cyber-espionage, and cyber-attacks which have emerged as some of the most urgent national security problems facing our country today. Apparently they think that making the entire Internet go down is the best way to make sure that important infrastructure is not threatened.
This shows the amount of control that this country has over the Internet and the fact that it is prepared to use that control. One of the fears of letting the US have the total control over ICANN was precisely because the rest of the world feared that it had too much control over the Internet. If the government can order the net turned off to protect its infrastructure then it could use that power as a weapon to bring sates it disagreed with into line.
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