The prediction in the PEW report that the most respondents agreed with was something I'd never even thought about before -- the possibility of a "devastating attack" on the infrastructure of the Internet itself.
I would not have imagined that such a thing would be possible, since the physical side of the Internet is servers, computers, network connections, and power supplies all over the world. Could a few targeted attacks to major servers cripple the whole system? Or could a clever virus spread across the Internet quickly enough to shut everything down? If these things are possible then I'm sure someone will try, but I would have guessed that the Internet is decentralized enough to be safe. I'll admit I don't know a lot about these things, though.
How do you think people would respond to a massive Internet blackout? When I was an undergrad we occasionally suffered a campus-wide loss of Internet service, due to physical problems with the cables connecting us to the outide world (we were located in a small town in the mountains). This was frustrating and annoying, but mostly because it deprived us of a valued source of entertainment. However, we knew that the problem was local and they'd get everything working again within a couple of days.
In the wider world I don't think there are yet many crucial services that depend on the Internet, so life could continue mostly as usual if there were an Internet blackout. Some people wouldn't have anything to do at work, but no one would die from it. My chief concern would be that people would panic if they knew something had gone wrong but couldn't rely on their usual source of instant, searchable news to find out what had happened. But if TV and radio were unaffected, the Internet blackout would surely be the big story on all channels.
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The Network Infrastructure prediction seems to be a bit of a fearmonger. The internet is so vast and the network infrastructure is constantly changing and being updated. If an individual or group of people plan on attacking the system internally, they too would have to be constantly updating their plans. It would be never ending. A physical attack could only damage select areas to target. There would probably be a greater psychological impact if an attack was to take place than any physical or network damage on the global internet infrastructure. While an attack might be damaging in the short-term, our trust and dependency would have to be reconstituted. However, if the rest of the PEW Study has accurate predictions, our lives will only grow more dependent on interacting with the internet and an attack that's not even devastating initially might have massive results in the long term.
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