Upvoted for raising the issue, even though I disagree with your point.
The internet itself was arguably put together in the ways you describe (government funding, many people contributing various bits, etc) but as far as I’m aware, the internet itself has no clean “off button”.
If it was somehow decided that the internet was a net harm to humanity for whatever reasons, then the only way to make it go away is for many, many actors to agree multilaterally and without defection that they will stop having their computers talk to other computers around the planet despite this being personally beneficial (email, voip, www, irc, torrent, etc) to themselves.
Technologies like broadcast radio and television are pretty susceptible to jamming, detection, and regulation. In contrast, the “freedom” inherent to the net may be “politically good” in some liberal and freedom-loving senses, but it makes for an abstractly troubling example of a world transforming computer technology created by large institutions with nominally positive intentions that turned out to be are hard to put back in the box. You may personally have a plan for a certain kind of off button and timer system, but that doesn’t strongly predict the same will be true of other systems that might be designed and built.
Right—well, you have to think something is likely to be dangerous to you in some way before you start adding paranoid safety features. The people who built the internet are mostly in a mutually beneficial relationship with it - so no problem.
I don’t pretend that building a system which you can deactivate helps other people if they want to deactivate it. A military robot might have an off switch that only the commander with the right private key could activate. If that commander wants to wipe out 90% of the humans on the planet, then his “off switch” won’t help them. That is not a scenario which a deliberate “off switch” is intended to help with in the first place.
Upvoted for raising the issue, even though I disagree with your point.
The internet itself was arguably put together in the ways you describe (government funding, many people contributing various bits, etc) but as far as I’m aware, the internet itself has no clean “off button”.
If it was somehow decided that the internet was a net harm to humanity for whatever reasons, then the only way to make it go away is for many, many actors to agree multilaterally and without defection that they will stop having their computers talk to other computers around the planet despite this being personally beneficial (email, voip, www, irc, torrent, etc) to themselves.
Technologies like broadcast radio and television are pretty susceptible to jamming, detection, and regulation. In contrast, the “freedom” inherent to the net may be “politically good” in some liberal and freedom-loving senses, but it makes for an abstractly troubling example of a world transforming computer technology created by large institutions with nominally positive intentions that turned out to be are hard to put back in the box. You may personally have a plan for a certain kind of off button and timer system, but that doesn’t strongly predict the same will be true of other systems that might be designed and built.
Right—well, you have to think something is likely to be dangerous to you in some way before you start adding paranoid safety features. The people who built the internet are mostly in a mutually beneficial relationship with it - so no problem.
I don’t pretend that building a system which you can deactivate helps other people if they want to deactivate it. A military robot might have an off switch that only the commander with the right private key could activate. If that commander wants to wipe out 90% of the humans on the planet, then his “off switch” won’t help them. That is not a scenario which a deliberate “off switch” is intended to help with in the first place.