I suppose:

1a. that’d be a lot of cables to take out

2b. many cables are terrestrial

3c. Putin would tick off other BRICS members and other countries

4d. ship-to-ship—maybe get some airplanes and balloons involved

5e. American Navy attacks Russian vessels cutting cables, and Biden tells Putin to stop this folly

I’m pretty sure it would result in the US internet being isolated from the rest of the worlds’

Which actually works against Putin since that means his troll farms also get cut off, meaning less new material for the useful idiots to keep other useful idiots freshly indoctrinated with.

A cable-cutting war will be absolutely devastating to the global economy. It’s the modern equivalent of Mutually Assured Destruction. There are few viable contingency plans.

I say this as a telecom wonk: hope and pray and vote so that war never comes.

Mid year 2018, maybe it was 2019, there was a massive internet outage. Closest guesstimate to the causes was a truck with their boom up ran through an intersection clipping fiber and power lines, and a fiber bundle was accidentally cut in a separate incident, this was all state side. Internet went down for nearly every ISP, services dead, country wide it was found we don’t have redundancy like we thought. You see, when internet lines are built out, the lines are divided up to different owners and leases, those third parties sell backup internet services to major isp’s, but no one was checking if the backup was running across the same infrastructure at any point, sales was selling, and the backup lines worked and we never had a full bundle break previously that was carrying main and backup bundles. When this outage happened, it hit Russia as well. Russia had an internet outage because of 2 bunlde breaks in the US. This tells me they are linked to the US network, and might infact be capable of doing multiple nefarious activities that made use of the wide open hole we had in our infrastructure. Now I don’t know if our infrastructure was patched, they kept that above most peoples pay grade. But the weakness was there, and it was on display to the entire world plain as day. They could either poison our networks/DNS/routing tables/etc with their high-speed connections, or just use it as a heartbeat to see the success of internet based attacks.

Something like 1% of internet traffic is by satellite…

I would imagine that it would be equally devastating to Putin to cut the cables as it would be to anybody else. I want to believe that he’s bluffing, trolling everybody to get their attention and reactions.

A large amount but at 500ms+ latency it might as well be useless for most applications.

Basically none. The satellite link isn’t getting traffic directly between you and the server you are reaching - the satellite just relays the data to the nearest ground station that then uses the normal fibre network to get the rest of the way.

Even if you managed to reconfigure starlink to be a peering network rather than an access network, you’d still have the issue that the starlink network as a whole has orders of magnitude less bandwidth than even one under sea cable

oddly enough i think the internet would have to behave in a federated way

content would need to be cached in connected areas and we would need to optimize use of the satellite connections to propagate content between federated islands

Won’t do this cause it’ll hurt em friends Marc, Elon and Donald too.

I think most of our critical ones are in the Atlantic. And I don’t think China would be too happy with them taking them out in the Pacific.

It would give them (satellite internet providers) a boost if the cable cutting were continuosly occurring to a point of crippling then they may turn back the clock to what they have in military installations that’s an Intranet a closed network but closed because they choose for it to be it doesn’t actually have to be if they host large servers in areas that work on a local area connection (LAN) either and/or WIFI joined together and users connect to those servers to effectively use in effect a home made custom internet (Intranet) you could have frontend user interfaces to allow you pick and choose services or a search engine and or a file sharing server etc etc, you could even use banking apps just closed networked together, you could ramp that up by using large scale wifi and or satellite dish style relays or large antenna array equivelencies of such a thing capable of sending out the signal across an entire country and possibly beyond that…in fact theoretically it would be far safer to do that than having the current setup we usefor internet over undersea cables and so on in terms of outside access being denied, provided encryption was extremely high p2p end to end as well, it would be a case of if the owner says no then you don’t get in unless they want you to, at that stage unless your in the country on site physically thre in person to incercept the transmitted data and break the code to access it, then you can’t use it thus international countries cannot communicate or attack on it or inside of it and most certainly not entire building fulls of hackers any way, the serve3r providers would simply just transmit the data outbound to other countries as and when required not feed everything as in all communications through cables that every person can physically cut or attack out at sea or in some building in some on other continent it would prevent data being intercepted for the most part and lower infrastructure related hacks taking place and or working achieving success would be far lower than ever before. . The speeds would be confined to the relays speed and your connecting devices bandwidths as well so potentially ultra fast as well if the hardware improved further in time, that’s alsio a way of loosing cables in ocean’s for good doing that at the same time theoretically. It will not happen though, the world would say “enough’s enough” before that stage of cable destruction were remotely possible to achieve by the Russian’s