Hacking into the mainframe to turn the internets back on, bro. No worries.
There are alternatives like mesh networks and radio, but recently in Afghanistan they cut off the internet… Literally. They severed the lines and made the entire country dark.
It’s important to remember that many governments probably planned for this from day one. Free speech is one of the things totalitarian regimes fear the most. I can imagine a dictator saying “I want to get in on this internet thing, but I absolutely must be able to shut it down if things get uncomfortable for me.”
I would think that a “kill switch” was planned for and installed before anything else.
If your phone was turned off you wouldn’t be able to comment, internet works on the same principle if it’s turned off then you can’t connect to it to hack it and the place they would have to go to to connect to it directly is probably guarded by people that will most likely use bullets to ask you what you are doing there, this isn’t Watch Dogs, reality is a lot more dangerous.
No private citizen has enough money to fund their own DNS and fiber backbone like a few people in Europe or USA can. The countries you mentioned have the State control all the DNS servers and fiber channels that ingress/egress the country because they control all the money, so they can simply disconnect power supply to the facilities and put the maintenance employees on furlough to completely shut off the network.
Next question.
Its not even that complicated. Just apply an allowlist firewall that only allows the elites access, or in a full blown outage, power off the core switches at the fiber ingress points.
With SDN, you could even just wipe the configs to disable the internet, and then reapply the config to bring them back up later. Could literally be setup as a “push button” if anyone wanted it configured that way.
A layer 3 firewall whitelist can be bypassed with MAC spoofing or duplication, ARP table poisoning, DHCP lease timestamp forging?
Maybe If you can get to it. Power down all the trunk ports but the palace/military/etc.
If you have control of the national uplinks to the rest of the world, it’s quite the simple affair to turn off traffic for ISPs. If you are a telecom provider and you are visited by military with authority to shoot you on the spot, you are quite inclined to obey and shut down the network as it will happen regardless you are alive or not.
Whatever wired local city networks may still function or not, depending on circumstances and the phase of the moon. Likely they will not be able to communicate with anybody else though.
Then there is nothing much to do for any opposition but to use covert satellite communications and those are much too important and slow and expensive for sharing with memes and porn.
They are shutting down the ISPs so that people can’t communicate within the same town and organise protests, it’s not just disconnecting from the wider web.
They’re also using military jamming equipment on starlink frequencies too.
The Internet depends on physical infrastructure like towers and cables, which can be shut off.
Satellite internet is the main way to access the Internet that cannot so easily be shut off because the infrastructure for that is in space, not the country’s borders. So this is why this news story exists for example: https://www.forbes.com/sites/zakdoffman/2026/01/12/kill-switch-iran-shuts-down-starlink-internet-for-first-time/
Really depends on what you mean by internet. It’s kinda like asking “how can a country shut down commerce?” - it can mean different things depending on what level said country would act on, but what they usually do to shut down the internet is equivalent in my example to ordering all banks to stop processing payments. You would still be able to trade something with your neighbor but you would not have a fully stocked Walmart available nearby.
They’ve built private internets based on authoritarian control.
Imagine a big pair of scissors. Imagine a tube that brings the Internet into the country. Use one on the other, no more Internet.
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