The post is mainly just a CTA against further internet centralization and government control of core infrastructure, which is fine. We need more of these, and we need more examples of their harms for folks to draw on. HN often gets distilled down to a singular cause - EU's Chat Control, Elon's shutdown of Starlink over Ukraine, a regional outage of a public cloud provider - but generalized topics like these aren't really discussed all too often I find, or are often flagged for a variety of reasons and shutdown.
As technologists of multiple stripes and disciplines - programmers, developers, engineers, architects, designers, product managers, etcetera - we need to collaborate more on the direction of our industry as a whole, rather than just specific niches we find appealing. From my specific perspective in IT, the increasing centralization across every vendor category (three major x86 server manufacturers, two CPU vendors, two GPU makers, three global-scale public clouds, ISP mono- and duopolies, a handful of commercial operating systems, a near-monopoly EUVL supplier - the list goes on) is a dire threat to not just the open internet, but open technology in general.
We need to be better advocates for and champions of the technological future we envision, rather than just blindly celebrate startups and tech fads all the time. Mr. Schneier is merely the latest and largest canary in the proverbial coal mine.
> From my specific perspective in IT, the increasing centralization across every vendor category (three major x86 server manufacturers, two CPU vendors, two GPU makers, three global-scale public clouds, ISP mono- and duopolies, a handful of commercial operating systems, a near-monopoly EUVL supplier - the list goes on) is a dire threat to not just the open internet, but open technology in general.
> We need to be better advocates for and champions of the technological future we envision, rather than just blindly celebrate startups and tech fads all the time.
There are already groups for these things (W3C, ICANN, IEEE, etc.), so how I interpret what you’re saying is that we need to abandon large corporations and go with... what exactly?
I’m not going rally behind a government administration that seeks dictatorial power over everything. That’s much worse than power spread over FAANG.
Thank you. There are so many TLAs (Three Letter Acronyms) that they overlap significantly. Maybe the coffee hasn't kicked in yet, but I didn't know what CTA meant in this context. I thought it might be related to PSA (Public Service Announcement), so I searched "CTA announcement" and got Chicago Transit Authority and California Teacher's Association - obviously not helpful.
Arguably CTA isn't exactly an obscure acronym. It's multi-disciplinary - quite common in UI/UX design and marketing; and also decently common in any branched of software engineering that interact with these topics, like... web development.
CTA is very obscure. As a mobile dev I refuse to call CTA as anything other than click or tap to action in which case it should be TPA. Also many folks (esp. PMs confuse CTAs with button clicks). Anyway, CTA in this context didn’t even ring a distant bell either for call or click and I am glad it didn’t.
I think in UI design it usually is intended to refer to the main thing you want/expect a user to do in any given situation, i.e. having multiple CTAs is a bit of an oxymoron while having multiple buttons is not.
I’ve worked with marketer types for over a decade and had them use the initialism “CTA” hundreds of times, understood it, and yet still in this comment I had no idea that they were referencing that term. If this was a UI diagram I’d have had no problem. This seems to me like a case where using an initialism in a different context than it usually appears confuses readers. It would kind of be like saying “I plan to GTM for a few things after work today.” You may recognize that as Go-To-Market if I said “the GTM team” at work, but it is strange outside that context. Outside a marketing or UI context I don’t think people usually initialize “CTA.”
It might not be obscure in an environment that lives on 'social activity', but I can assure you -- and I am saying this as a person, who survives daily barrages of acronyms, CTA is not common.
It's specific to marketing and it's a term I've only seen used when you are trying to sell a product. In my mind, CTA means "the button we are trying to make you click on by any means necessary because we make money when you click on it"
I don't think that is necessarily the case. If you use certain words all the time, shortening them makes sense. They might just forget which abbreviations are and aren't common knowledge. You wouldn't get mad if people use PC, CPU, ATM and RAM, right? Even SSD would be fine on HN, but it probably wouldn't be fine outside HN. (neither would using "HN")
> Even SSD would be fine on HN, but it probably wouldn't be fine outside HN.
The set of people who know the term "solid state drive" is likely a strict subset of the people (mostly tech enthusiasts of some shape) who know "SSD". Same for "USB" and many other terms that have entered the mainstream primarily as an abbreviation.
So the question is not whether to use an abbreviation or spell out the full term as a matter of principle; the question is whether it's the abbreviation or the full term that's more commonly known. I'd argue that way fewer people recognize "CTA" than know the term "call to action". I personally have done some front-end development, and didn't know the abbreviation either.
I don't know why people can't take 0.3 seconds to type "what does CTA stand for?" into their favorite search engine/LLM/text-message-to-a-friend. This is "Hacker" News, yes? What do hackers know how to do? Learn things, yes?
Oh, and I also don't know why this needs to come up on approximately every single post that has an abbreviation that someone doesn't know.
They could also write the comment in French, and by the same argument people should need to go out of their way to copy-paste that into google translate.
Thousands of people are going to read this thing. The writer could spare thousands of people spending tens of seconds (totaling days of human life), by simply spending less than a second spelling out the obscure term.
"In February 2022, two days after Russia's full-scale invasion, Ukraine requested that the American aerospace company SpaceX activate their Starlink satellite internet service in the country, to replace internet and communication networks degraded or destroyed during the war.[2][3][4] Starlink has since been used by Ukrainian civilians, government and military.[3][5] The satellite service has been employed for humanitarian purposes as well as defense and counterattacks on Russian positions.[6]"
"In 2022, Elon Musk denied a Ukrainian request to extend Starlink's coverage up to Russian-occupied Crimea during a counterattack on a Crimean port, from which Russia had been launching attacks against Ukrainian civilians; doing so would have violated US sanctions on Russia.[18] This event was widely reported in 2023, erroneously characterizing it as Musk "turning off" Starlink coverage in Crimea.[19][20]"
“ According to three people familiar with the command, Musk told a senior engineer at the California offices of SpaceX, the Musk venture that controls Starlink, to cut coverage in areas including Kherson, a strategic region north of the Black Sea that Ukraine was trying to reclaim.”
— https://www.reuters.com/investigations/musk-ordered-shutdown...
It is a fascinating thought. War being against TOS. And enforced thusly. As an abstract idea that is not connected to reality on the ground it offers a.. view into today's mind and what it can be compelled with.
If Starlink does not enforce its TOS, it is a weapon used in the war (guidance system for drones), and its satellites are legitimate targets for air defence.
West uses the same logic to bomb neutral tankers, because they may carry weapon or stuff!
My relatively mild amusement comes from war being against TOS, where war is effectively ultimate break of local level TOS. The only reason it is even discussed in this way is because, as war goes, it is contained. 'Real wars have no terms of service' is my subtle point.
edit: I accept I am a somewhat horrible person to even be able to articulate those thoughts.
It’s hard to be a better advocate without diving into the politics of why we’re in the situation we are, which also doesn’t address the amount of political power you and I have relative to the interests that want said technological consolidation to exist.
And given that the tech community trends towards political philosophies like libertarianism, which is inherently anti-organization and anti-collectivist, I’m not sure how you begin to scratch the surface of what a real solution looks like.
Politics are a factor but economics is a bigger one. With any technology, each successive generation inevitably requires larger and larger capital investments. Ideally governments should do more to preserve competition but when it costs >$10B to develop a new microchip manufacturing process that inherently limits how many players the market can support. And if one company bets on the wrong technology or gets the timing wrong that can leave them too financially weak to survive.
> when it costs >$10B to develop a new microchip manufacturing process that inherently limits how many players the market can support.
Does it though? TSMC's market cap is over a trillion dollars. Likewise Nvidia. What's $10B compared to these numbers? Less than 1%. Maybe we couldn't have a thousand of them, but why couldn't we have ten?
Not only that, this technology isn't a single invention, so why does it have to be a single company? Couldn't some companies make the fabs and other ones operate them, causing them each to require less capital and be easier to compete with on its own? Couldn't the various pieces of equipment in the fabs each be developed by a separate company?
"It costs >$10B to do this as a vertically integrated conglomerate" is bad, so maybe don't have that.
I assume it's cheaper to own the whole vertical slice at this scale, so you can control everything. Given that there's the financial incentive to do it, how would you prevent companies from growing vertically? If you declared a legal limit, how would you prevent a single entity from forming a chain of companies, effectively producing one huge vertical company as well?
Mostly the reason that these things are so capital intensive is due to market consolidation. If you want to do something useful and stay small, you have 2 choices: get crushed by a bigco or get absorbed.
Economics (allocation of scarce resources) is mostly defined by politics. For instance how you said that companies have to shut down if they take one bad risk and they don't get another chance - there was an explicit political decision that companies should work that way.
This piece could be infinitely long trying to address every single angle that is relevant, big or small. Or it could just cut to the heart of the matter and ask us all to fill in the rest. I’m fine with the latter, personally, as the “why” is not really what they’re debating. Whatever the cause(s), the end result is currently undesirable and necessitates action. We can unpack the “why” as we try to fix it.
> From my specific perspective in IT, the increasing centralization across every vendor category (three major x86 server manufacturers, two CPU vendors, two GPU makers, three global-scale public clouds, ISP mono- and duopolies, a handful of commercial operating systems, a near-monopoly EUVL supplier - the list goes on) is a dire threat to not just the open internet, but open technology in general.
Part of the reason why we have seen this absurd centralization is complexity. It used to be possible for third parties to tape out an x86-compatible CPU and in fact there were multiple vendors doing this - but it's impossible these days, mostly from a financial viewpoint (you'll probably need a few billion dollars in R&D plus the licensing cost), but also from a technological viewpoint - you'd need to have feature parity with Intel/AMD x86 CPUs and some material improvement actually enticing people to buy your new CPU.
In the end the "free market" will always lead to such concentration effects and, most importantly, to de facto standards because the dominant actor(s) will always be the cross-section of "offers the most features, is used everywhere else, is affordable".
The fix requires governmental intervention (be it anti-trust legislation, mandatory sharing of resources/access for dominant entities or whatever), but sadly we can't even do regime changes to get rid of kleptocrats like the Taliban any more...
Exactly... In fact this realisation has been the main reason why I shifted my views (in my teenage years) from libertarian to more centrist.
Having grown up in a falling communist state full of state sanctioned monopolies I thought free market will sort it out. Later I realised you need a balance between free market and interventionism, but for the latter to work you need a way to prevent corruption and a good justice system. Things that are very hard to come by in many parts of the world
It didn't help that the fall of Yugoslavia and the USSR coincided with Thatcherism/neoliberalism. People widely mistook correlation for causation, although particularly in former pseudo-communist nations that was understandable given how fast progress came in...
But the nasty awakening? That came crashing hard and painful, once the dust settled, a lot of assets got looted and progress mostly stopped.
Do unions work against corporate mergers? I’d imagine they do as they tend to work against corporate interests in general but I’m not that well versed in this sort of history.
I thought this would be advocating "chaos monkey" style intentional shutdown to test institutions for resiliency in an outage situation. Might not be a bad idea. Maybe once every four years on leap day or something.
would it be better to start the intentional shutdown at say a couple of minutes before midnight so you know the shutdown wasn't perhaps caused by the leap day bug?
In general I agree, but too much resilience can lead to worse infrastructure. Where I live, a couple hours of unannounced electricity outage every week is a non-event, so wires are patched in more and more points. And there's little motivation to invest significant money and time once to replace them by something more robust.
Centralized infrastructure is fragile and to the extent that the internet has become centralized unscheduled Internet shutdowns are bound to happen. The benefit of scheduled Internet shutdown is that people can prepare for it while at the same time gaining experience which helps with dealing with an unscheduled Internet shutdown.
On the other hand, if we force all systems to be resilient to an internet shutdown then we'd end up regressing society by a lot. Think about how much more work a single doctor is able to handle more efficiently by having internet access (eg. charts, patient history, access to all the world's libraries) that would be lost without the internet.
While it may not be practical from a technical perspective, the current US president has suggested shutting down parts of the Internet to ostensibly combat terrorist recruiting.
Lets be honest about it. There is no political power on this planet that does not see information flow as a vector that needs to be controlled ( and if they don't, sadly, they likely will not remain in power for long.. ). If true, we are just very lucky, it did not happen sooner. In a weird sense, it helps that corporate interests prevent it.
They succeeded. You're linking to something from 2015 so it was about "ISIS", but in 2025 he did manage to censor TikTok so people wouldn't be "recruited" to "Hamas".
multiple satellite operators are coming on line. what are the odds all of them coordinate to shut down in one region invalidating using the other providers as fail over?
I might be mistaken, but as far as I know there is currently no other LEO broadband provider that is meaningfully comparable at a global scale.
Starlink is often treated as the reference point not because it is perfect or fully resilient,
but because there is no second network at a similar scale that could realistically serve as a failover today.
If we imagine a hypothetical future where three mature operators exist, then yes — absent coordinated political or geopolitical action, at least one network might remain online.
However, even that surviving operator would not necessarily provide full coverage of the affected region.
Global redundancy is extremely hard in practice, because maintaining continuous, worldwide LEO coverage is not free — it requires massive capex and opex, ground stations, regulatory permissions, and local political approval.
True worldwide failover remains more of a theoretical construct than an operational reality.
That particular section I have to Wikipedia article seems to have gone through a bunch of anonymous edits back and forth around the content of this citation
Probably because it's not actually a truthful characterization of what happened! I know it's popular to find every possible reason to bag on Musk, but you don't need to resort to disinformation to do it.
Can't talk for the USA, but it's widely acknowledged that the spread of broadband in Europe was driven by P2P and tools like Emule/eDonkey or BitTorrent.
We need some similar killer application for satellite connectivity and mesh networking. Something that makes the technology so requested and so ubiquitous in such a short time that it couldn't be banned even if they tried.
The beam forming used by Starlink (and Starshield) is highly resistant to jamming. But Starlink doesn't offer service in some countries. And the ground terminals can be detected.
According to Gigazine (Osaka, est. 2000), "In 2024, there were 296 internet shutdowns in 54 countries around the world, with Myanmar, India, Pakistan and Russia accounting for about 70% of the total."
> I suspect most can guess where this mess will end up, and it’s not good.
What I read from this is going to sound conspiratorial, but I think it’s a valid “read between the lines” of an insider. I think they’re saying that they’re alarmed that Silicon Valley is supporting the current U.S. administration assuming he’s doing what’s best for their welfare, while it’s clear based on the activities of Iran and others that are practicing working without internet that they are planning on losing internet, which could either be because Iran, Russia, China, or the U.S. itself may plan to sever or disable internet connections (while unsure what would be isolated or disabled) as an act of war or extreme and dangerously naive nationalism.
Its become clear that the axiom “The Net Interprets Censorship As Damage and Routes Around It” as no longer true. It hasnt been since before 2010 anecdotely but the data Schneier presents here is undeniable
This is still somewhat true. For example, Russia is now frequently shutting down mobile Internet. Ostensibly for protection against drone attacks, but even it had to relent a bit and allow at least some whitelisted services to work.
So immediately local VPN companies started providing the unrestricted access through proxies at these services.
India doesn’t do any of this. This is all propaganda by CIA, Ford Foundation, and George Soros. India is the biggest democracy and we had autonomous and conscious flying air-things when the world barely even existed in this form i.e. millennia ago. This is the best UNESCO certified country in the world led by a non-biological (in His own words) head of state. Now, bow!
PS. Don’t forget the zero! You still owe us that much.
One more reason to resist the fragile lifestyle that requires constant internet access. Even if you don't live in a totalitarian country where shutting down the net would be easy and probable.
Some time ago someone posted in Twitter a letter of Theodore Kaczynski giving life advice, one point being not to use internet for more than one hour a day. Too bad I couldn't find it anymore.
Living without the Internet is still doable.
Just a little bit harder.
You gonna lose some time and money (buying bus tickets physically and not buying cheap junk over the internet, BUT you're gonna gain like literally 6h per day :)
Been there, done that. Its net positive experience.
Just like going back to 1999.
Depends where one lives. In my location there is zero dependency on the internet. It's just a convenience thing and the growing number of miscreants on the internet is negating that balance for me personally. Sooner than later I am going back to a landline and ditching the cell phone.
why is this flagged? (maybe Theo? I don’t know this person).
Its absolutely a good argument against fragile IoT devices that have no local/offline mode and the ever increasing lurch of internet requirements for our daily life.
I’m not sure my phone does much of anything without an internet connection. Yet it is my primary banking and authentication method (via BankID).
EDIT: Theodore Kaczynski is the unabomber… well, thats an odd name to drop and maybe not an ideal candidate for life advice.
It's getting downvoted because (1) this person is suggesting the answer to governments taking away our ability to freely communicate is to stop freely communicating (2) he's giving life advice from a terrorist mass murderer.
Yes, you're not at risk from being cut off from the world if you're not connected to it in the first place. That's not a state most of us want to exist in. Ted Kaczynski lived in a small cabin in the woods away from humanity.
Worship of the eternal steady-state. Whoever speaks against any intervention to preserve it is a heretic, and must be excommunicated.
Whether it’s ML training, pentesting, or old-fashioned engineering, we have to throw the occasional curve-ball at our systems in order to improve them. Surprise internet shutdowns are good, even if the ostensible reasons for them are dumb. Maybe people will host more information offline, and become less dependent on cloud services…
As technologists of multiple stripes and disciplines - programmers, developers, engineers, architects, designers, product managers, etcetera - we need to collaborate more on the direction of our industry as a whole, rather than just specific niches we find appealing. From my specific perspective in IT, the increasing centralization across every vendor category (three major x86 server manufacturers, two CPU vendors, two GPU makers, three global-scale public clouds, ISP mono- and duopolies, a handful of commercial operating systems, a near-monopoly EUVL supplier - the list goes on) is a dire threat to not just the open internet, but open technology in general.
We need to be better advocates for and champions of the technological future we envision, rather than just blindly celebrate startups and tech fads all the time. Mr. Schneier is merely the latest and largest canary in the proverbial coal mine.
> We need to be better advocates for and champions of the technological future we envision, rather than just blindly celebrate startups and tech fads all the time.
There are already groups for these things (W3C, ICANN, IEEE, etc.), so how I interpret what you’re saying is that we need to abandon large corporations and go with... what exactly?
I’m not going rally behind a government administration that seeks dictatorial power over everything. That’s much worse than power spread over FAANG.
The set of people who know the term "solid state drive" is likely a strict subset of the people (mostly tech enthusiasts of some shape) who know "SSD". Same for "USB" and many other terms that have entered the mainstream primarily as an abbreviation.
So the question is not whether to use an abbreviation or spell out the full term as a matter of principle; the question is whether it's the abbreviation or the full term that's more commonly known. I'd argue that way fewer people recognize "CTA" than know the term "call to action". I personally have done some front-end development, and didn't know the abbreviation either.
Oh, and I also don't know why this needs to come up on approximately every single post that has an abbreviation that someone doesn't know.
I don't know why people can't not exaggerate things? Doing it is certainly making their message less reliable, not more
Thousands of people are going to read this thing. The writer could spare thousands of people spending tens of seconds (totaling days of human life), by simply spending less than a second spelling out the obscure term.
"In February 2022, two days after Russia's full-scale invasion, Ukraine requested that the American aerospace company SpaceX activate their Starlink satellite internet service in the country, to replace internet and communication networks degraded or destroyed during the war.[2][3][4] Starlink has since been used by Ukrainian civilians, government and military.[3][5] The satellite service has been employed for humanitarian purposes as well as defense and counterattacks on Russian positions.[6]"
"In 2022, Elon Musk denied a Ukrainian request to extend Starlink's coverage up to Russian-occupied Crimea during a counterattack on a Crimean port, from which Russia had been launching attacks against Ukrainian civilians; doing so would have violated US sanctions on Russia.[18] This event was widely reported in 2023, erroneously characterizing it as Musk "turning off" Starlink coverage in Crimea.[19][20]"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlink_in_the_Russian-Ukrain...
Last time starlink was used to sank tanker near Turkey. It was miracle tanker was empty, and there was no ecological catastrophe!
West uses the same logic to bomb neutral tankers, because they may carry weapon or stuff!
edit: I accept I am a somewhat horrible person to even be able to articulate those thoughts.
And given that the tech community trends towards political philosophies like libertarianism, which is inherently anti-organization and anti-collectivist, I’m not sure how you begin to scratch the surface of what a real solution looks like.
Does it though? TSMC's market cap is over a trillion dollars. Likewise Nvidia. What's $10B compared to these numbers? Less than 1%. Maybe we couldn't have a thousand of them, but why couldn't we have ten?
Not only that, this technology isn't a single invention, so why does it have to be a single company? Couldn't some companies make the fabs and other ones operate them, causing them each to require less capital and be easier to compete with on its own? Couldn't the various pieces of equipment in the fabs each be developed by a separate company?
"It costs >$10B to do this as a vertically integrated conglomerate" is bad, so maybe don't have that.
That's politics.
Part of the reason why we have seen this absurd centralization is complexity. It used to be possible for third parties to tape out an x86-compatible CPU and in fact there were multiple vendors doing this - but it's impossible these days, mostly from a financial viewpoint (you'll probably need a few billion dollars in R&D plus the licensing cost), but also from a technological viewpoint - you'd need to have feature parity with Intel/AMD x86 CPUs and some material improvement actually enticing people to buy your new CPU.
In the end the "free market" will always lead to such concentration effects and, most importantly, to de facto standards because the dominant actor(s) will always be the cross-section of "offers the most features, is used everywhere else, is affordable".
The fix requires governmental intervention (be it anti-trust legislation, mandatory sharing of resources/access for dominant entities or whatever), but sadly we can't even do regime changes to get rid of kleptocrats like the Taliban any more...
Having grown up in a falling communist state full of state sanctioned monopolies I thought free market will sort it out. Later I realised you need a balance between free market and interventionism, but for the latter to work you need a way to prevent corruption and a good justice system. Things that are very hard to come by in many parts of the world
But the nasty awakening? That came crashing hard and painful, once the dust settled, a lot of assets got looted and progress mostly stopped.
If you think that working for people is against corporate interests then I think we should just be dine with corporations.
I like people!
Advantage: You no longer need to fix that leap day bug on your website.
https://time.com/4150891/republican-debate-donald-trump-inte...
Of course, once jamming enters the picture, even that lifeline disappears.
Note that one of the higher-profile deliberate internet shutdowns was Starlink itself shutting down internet connectivity in Ukraine.
Neither option is risk-free; the failure modes simply differ.
A government can shut you off for political reasons, a corporation can shut you off for contractual or geopolitical ones.
As long as the system assumes centralized stewardship for safety or reliability, someone will inevitably hold the switch — the only variable is who.
multiple satellite operators are coming on line. what are the odds all of them coordinate to shut down in one region invalidating using the other providers as fail over?
Starlink is often treated as the reference point not because it is perfect or fully resilient, but because there is no second network at a similar scale that could realistically serve as a failover today.
If we imagine a hypothetical future where three mature operators exist, then yes — absent coordinated political or geopolitical action, at least one network might remain online.
However, even that surviving operator would not necessarily provide full coverage of the affected region. Global redundancy is extremely hard in practice, because maintaining continuous, worldwide LEO coverage is not free — it requires massive capex and opex, ground stations, regulatory permissions, and local political approval.
True worldwide failover remains more of a theoretical construct than an operational reality.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/sep/07/elon-musk...
Probably because it's not actually a truthful characterization of what happened! I know it's popular to find every possible reason to bag on Musk, but you don't need to resort to disinformation to do it.
We need some similar killer application for satellite connectivity and mesh networking. Something that makes the technology so requested and so ubiquitous in such a short time that it couldn't be banned even if they tried.
Is that really? US government has tanks, bombers, missiles and tactical nukes while "a well regulated Militia" have petty rifles and motolovs.
It's very easy for US government to cause state-wide power blackout, effectively shutdown Internet.
https://gigazine.net/gsc_news/en/20250228-internet-shutdowns...
Covering Adelaide, South Australia. Such communities should exist in most cities.
> I suspect most can guess where this mess will end up, and it’s not good.
What I read from this is going to sound conspiratorial, but I think it’s a valid “read between the lines” of an insider. I think they’re saying that they’re alarmed that Silicon Valley is supporting the current U.S. administration assuming he’s doing what’s best for their welfare, while it’s clear based on the activities of Iran and others that are practicing working without internet that they are planning on losing internet, which could either be because Iran, Russia, China, or the U.S. itself may plan to sever or disable internet connections (while unsure what would be isolated or disabled) as an act of war or extreme and dangerously naive nationalism.
So immediately local VPN companies started providing the unrestricted access through proxies at these services.
PS. Don’t forget the zero! You still owe us that much.
Some time ago someone posted in Twitter a letter of Theodore Kaczynski giving life advice, one point being not to use internet for more than one hour a day. Too bad I couldn't find it anymore.
You gonna lose some time and money (buying bus tickets physically and not buying cheap junk over the internet, BUT you're gonna gain like literally 6h per day :)
Been there, done that. Its net positive experience. Just like going back to 1999.
More to your point though, even if it does, maybe it should not realy on it.
Its absolutely a good argument against fragile IoT devices that have no local/offline mode and the ever increasing lurch of internet requirements for our daily life.
I’m not sure my phone does much of anything without an internet connection. Yet it is my primary banking and authentication method (via BankID).
EDIT: Theodore Kaczynski is the unabomber… well, thats an odd name to drop and maybe not an ideal candidate for life advice.
Yes, you're not at risk from being cut off from the world if you're not connected to it in the first place. That's not a state most of us want to exist in. Ted Kaczynski lived in a small cabin in the woods away from humanity.
Whether it’s ML training, pentesting, or old-fashioned engineering, we have to throw the occasional curve-ball at our systems in order to improve them. Surprise internet shutdowns are good, even if the ostensible reasons for them are dumb. Maybe people will host more information offline, and become less dependent on cloud services…
I'll correct that to: Surprise internet outages are good
For the same outcomes though. More and varied methods of contingency.
(there are actual web hosting companies in Kabul, and it seems its not illegal to send money there)