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Is There Such a Thing as an Internet Kill Switch?

Is there a switch you can flick to kill the internet? According to a panel of experts at this year's SXSW Conference in Austin, Texas, that universal "kill switch" does not exist — yet.

"When people figure out how to push the right buttons…it just makes us better at realizing that taking the steps to get more resilient are necessary," Christian Dawson, co-founder of the Internet Infrastructure Coalition said during a Friday panel.

The idea doesn't seem that far-fetched, especially following two recent incidents that knocked parts of the internet offline: one, a simple typo by Amazon Web Services; the other, a botnet attack on internet company Dyn.

As NBC News reports, a Brookings Institution report released in October found that in the previous year, internet 81 disruptions in 19 countries came at a cost of $2.4 billion total to the economies of those nations.

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