The Intertubes are burning out today with reaction to news of a bill introduced into the United States Senate by Senator Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia that would give the President the power “to seize temporary control of private-sector networks during a so-called cybersecurity emergency.”

In other words: Obama would take over the Internet. That’s the chatter about it anyway.

Is such a thing even possible? Plausible? I’ll suggest that it’s more than okay to raise hell about the civil liberties aspect of such a notion, but in terms of technical capability I don’t see how we should be anything more than cautiously alarmed about this. For one thing, the Internet was designed from the getgo to take a lickin’ and keep on tickin’ in the event of a catastrophic systemwide loss of communication (namely, nuclear war). It’s too decentralized, far too distributed a network. I’m not saying that there ...