Can the Internet be shut down?

Inside the US? Yes.

Miles 'Bunker Boy' Long

Miles 'Bunker Boy' Long

I believe the majority of web servers are Apache not Microsoft.

Slainte,

Can the Internet be shut down? NO. Reason? Too many nodes (connection points) maintained by too many different sources. No one company or carrier, fortunately, owns the various parts of the vertebrae that connect the nodes. Of course, the fascist Oval Office could turn a Joseph Goebbels on us and strong arm thousands of entities to do what ever it wanted in our worst nightmare.

The internet was created to communicate data during a national emergency, such as a nuclear attack. As for whether it can be shut down, there are seven servers that control the routing of IP addresses. They were almost taken down in late 2002.

Yeah, as soon as all those 'hackers' that the FBI can never seem to catch very many of can succeed in breeching firewalls.

I think the actual number is 13. I seem to remember a website called something like www.root-servers.net that had basic info, but this site may no longer exist.

No however the major facilities here in Southern California can be shut down and that would have a considerable impact on services in the United States.

Umm, these are DNS servers (13 of them). They are responsible for distributing name/number associations to many more DNS servers. They do not control the routing of packets. This is done using signalling protocols between individual routers.

Slainte,

By the way, I believe at the very top of the heap is 1 DNS server (it is one of the 13) and it resides at an undisclosed location in northern Virginia. I believe 11 of the 12 others reside in the US, but this could've changed.

Slainte,

strategic, massive DOS attack.