There is current buzz about a proposed US Senate bill that could grant the president the power to "control" the Internet.
Bill would give president emergency control of Internet
Apart from the obvious issues here, there is something far more troubling in the article.
A Senate source familiar with the bill compared the president's power to take control of portions of the Internet to what President Bush did when grounding all aircraft on Sept. 11, 2001.
This isn't really a comparison at all. In the US, every single aircraft in the sky is regulated by an organization called the Federal Aviation Administration. The FAA has the ability to tell a plane it can't takeoff. The Internet was specifically build in a manner that it can't be "shut down". I'd be surprised if any of the large backbone providers could even shut down their networks in less than a week. The Internet is basically an unregulated mess. It's what makes it so cool. This bill is most likely another example of an out of touch lawmaker trying to apply tangible ideas to an intangible thing.
There isn't even a possible analogy here, as there really isn't anything that exists comparable to the Internet. Nowhere else do you have a huge collection of computers, scattered all over the world that are mostly able to communicate freely.
