The internet is not some single entity. It’s a collaboration of all countries all over the world sharing their IP addresses with each other using open standard protocols so that everyone can talk to everyone. To get a single country cut off from the rest of the world would require active participation from every country around the world which is highly unlikely. At most you’d just have some or most countries participating in the ban.
What would happen to North Korea in that case? For the common people, nothing. They are already living with very limited and filtered access. For the government agencies that have full access, they would likely work a deal with a country to get the rest of the internet routed through them.
Isn’t it just a matter of cutting off a couple of undersea cables? Sure satellite will still be available, but disrupting those cables can take out most of the country’s connectivity.
Yeah sure, you can cut the cables. But like you said, alternate means of accessing the information exist as well. Technology limitations can be very difficult to enforce and maintain due to how quickly it can grow and evolve if people are motivated enough. Which the North Korean government definitely would be.
Isn’t it just a matter of cutting off a couple of undersea cables?
North Korea isn’t an island. It shares a land border with Russia and China. My guess is that North Korea’s main telecom connectivity is through China. If China is cutting off North Korean internet, internet access is the least of its worries.
It’s probably easier than you think. I suspect interconnects are consolidated into a handful of buildings. Satellite might be more difficult but need a clear line of site to the sky, making them visible targets.
A few well placed explosions would cripple NK.
It’s probably easier than you think. I suspect interconnects are consolidated into a handful of buildings.
That’s true for pretty much all countries. Virtually all countries have a few sites that are responsible for routing the majority of the countries Internet traffic. The trick is keeping it that way. It’s very easy to throw in some kind of band-aid solution to get it back up and running if you are able to throw enough resources at the problem.
Isn’t that already the case? Or are you talking in terms of the government access to the worldwide internet?
Yes
Then yeah, Russia or China would help them get around that.
I suspect China would allow them access somehow.
If you oppose the Kim regime, expanded internet access in NKorea would be a wise goal.
So ignoring the technical problem of how it could actually be done, let’s assume we somehow did it, cut every cable, and somehow blocked every cell tower and satellite from somehow connecting to North Korea to the rest of the world.
For the average north korean citizen, probably nothing much changes, most of them don’t have much access to the internet to begin with.
For those who do, the elites, people in university, those government, military, etc. it will probably worry a bit.
For the elites who get to enjoy the internet as a luxury, probably not too much changes. I doubt that except for maybe the very top echelons of DPRK society, the Kim family for example (and maybe not even some of them,) anyone is getting totally unrestricted access to the global Internet. They’re probably limited to mostly a bunch of north korean-hosted websites, and unless they’re relying on data centers and such abroad (and they very well might be,) there’s not really much we can do to take them down unless we really want to go in and attack all of the internal Internet infrastructure.
It’s going to hamper their universities and such, sucks for them, probably no great loss for the world, the next big scientific break through probably wasn’t coming from the hermit kingdom anyway.
It will definitely hurt their ability to conduct espionage, cyber attacks and such, that goes both ways though and it also makes it harder for other countries to spy on them.
They will do their usual sabre-rattling in response, maybe even going a bit above and beyond their usual mostly empty gestures, but probably nothing that’s going to lead to any actual escalation p
