Pending federal legislation called the Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act of 2010, aka Senate bill 3480, would grant the president of the United States the power to cut Internet access in a declared emergency, including blocking the Web for as many as 30 days, through a new agency to be called the National Center for Cybersecurity and Communications. This concept was introduced last year, and it returned to the forefront this week when the S.3480 bill passed in its committee on the same day Egypt's Internet connection was shut down to curtail widespread government protests.
Bad timing.
The popular myth is that the Internet can't be shut down. This was true in the days of the original peer-to-peer architecture of first ARPAnet and the original Internet, which the U.S. Defense Department designed to be resilient in the face of a nuclear attack or similar event. In such a case, the Internet would automatically reroute itself through accessible nodes. But today, as Egypt learned, the huge backbones that feed Internet service providers can in fact be plugged. Less dramatically, we've seen in the United States that a cut fiber line can leave large communities disconnected for days.
<snip>
Already, the very idea of a government Internet kill switch is spurring changes in user behavior as the more paranoid move their email and calendars back from cloud-based systems to locally controlled servers. If this bill progresses, more will follow suit. The fact that a business could be shut down by the government with just a flick of a kill switch will make many organizations think long and hard about their move to the cloud.
http://www.infoworld.com/d/cloud-computing/the-internet-kill-switch-idea-already-hurting-cloud-computing-720I'm not sure if the title really matches the article, but it still says something that should be said.