[encoderer]

This is, honestly, absurd. Society depends on the internet? Sure, some people depend on the internet. And some companies. And some verticals.

But "depends" sounds to me like... without it, society will crumble or go through some dramatic metamorphosis. I find that... questionable to say the least. I don't remember much about the 1980s, I was 8, but I'm faily certain it wasn't the dark ages as it seems you're suggesting. Eliminate the internet off tomorrow, and society will carry on.

Eliminate motor vehicles? Electricity? Complete chaos.

The idea that it's some big problem because people can't differentiate between Facebook and some blog?

This is more myopic thinking. You're acting like if you're not on the internet you must either be amish or impoverished. Please.

[someplacecold]

HA! You just don't get it. ALL the processes for which the internet provides a mission-critical service are going to freeze. What happens when MasterCard suddenly can't access the balance of its creditees anymore? What happens when you need your social security check? What happens when you need money from a bank? Who's tracking stocks? How are you going to get all your important emails, or your contacts, or your off-site financial records from company x? All these processes are not trivially related to the internet; they depend on it in a way that cannot just be "fixed". Make not mistake, our financial system is completely and 100% dependent on internet, and if you take it away, there will be a complete disaster. Sure, some of it will eventually get where it needs to go, but some of it won't. And some of that information you need NOW.

I'll say it again: without the internet, these processes FREEZE. And that's just the effects that don't involve the lack of ability to communicate. Here are some more:

Google is worth $154 billion. That's one company alone. There are lots of companies, lots of small business that are purely internet companies. I'd say, what, a couple trillion dollars worth just in the valley alone? What happens when the internet disappears? They are all suddenly useless. Maybe it doesn't sound like a big deal, but there is a LOT of money tied up in those companies. Not only would investors lose basically all money (and thus, losing their ability to leverage more bets, etc., depending on how deep they were in), the companies that were banking on those companies to buy things would lose money. And many, many more companies would lose time and energy due to vastly decreased productivity related to not being able to get those products in as fast a manner as the internet allows.

Then there's the fact that there is a lot of valuable information stored on the internet. What happens when MasterCard suddenly can't access the balance of its creditees anymore? Who's going to absorb that debt? You? What happens when you need your social security check? What happens when you need money from a bank?

It's no secret that e-commerce is big business in the US. Even a lot of businesses that are relatively small do e-commerce a lot of times, so you also have to count the fact that all their investments are sunk, too. Then there's the cost of the lost business that brought them, which they may have been banking on. Then there's the fact that, again, they can't get goods as fast as they used to because the efficient means of communication are gone.

Then there are the international implications, which means you can take all of what's said up there, and cross-apply the affects to them, as well as how those effects will affect us.

Oh, and I still haven't discussed the fact that you benefit more than you even know from information accessibility. For the last 10+ years, you've been slowly teaching yourself that you don't need to memorize everything because you have the internet. What happens when you need all those facts, but now they're gone? What happens when reporters don't have access to those facts? What happens when vital government organizations don't have access to those facts? And it's not just you: our entire society is built around this accessibility of information. Without it, we are blind.

So yes, the internet is integral to our way of living, and in fact, the way of living of the world as a whole. If you cannot see that, you need to exit the tech sector immediately.

[encoderer]

Are you kidding?

You have no notion of the resiliency of our economy or our history as a civilization if you think that "pulling the plug" on the internet would be some crippling event.

Yes, business would be affected. But our civilization would collapse? I mean, you think people would just start hording guns and food because the INTERNET stopped working?

If Mastercard couldn't use the internet, you know what it would do? It would use banks of dedicated lines and dial-up modems to process cards, the same way it still does to this very day in most businesses.

I get that you live and breath this stuff, so do I. But you should seriously consider subjecting yourself to a liberal arts education. You need perspective. Our civilization has survived amazing adversity. Pandemics. World Wars. Revolutions. You think the internet would break us? Seriously?

[robryan]

Individual people don't need to be on the internet but if the internet as a whole were to disappear society would crumble. No one is saying that the 80's were a dark age but things we could previously manage without the internet have now become totally dependent on the internet and more and more things are every day.