ICANN is decentralized and has a lot of in-built security that prevents one site from infiltrating or poisoning the rest of the overall system. That’s why no governments have tried to fuck with it. Not only would it not work, but it would potentially become an international incident. But ICANN is really only the keeper of TLDs anymore, they don’t run any other base infrastructure of the overarching internet. You don’t need domain names to make IP networks talk to each other (ie: darkweb).

The only thing Trump could try and do is push ISPs to conform to laws Congress passes that influences the way network traffic is run (filtering, blocking…etc), which is what China has done with their Great Firewall shit. This would not end well for a number of reasons, and just isn’t likely or feasible to happen in the US.

Are you sourcing ideas?

I wouldn’t it put it last these dudes: “find out what scares the FOSS nerds and do that”

If what you’re asking is “could the US hypothetically cut off the Internet in a worst case scenario”, like a war or something, the answer is “sure”. If the US were bent on destroying Internet infrastructure – submarine cable interchange stations, satellite uplink stations, major international cables, whatever, all of those are not hardened not realistically protectable targets and could be physically destroyed. Taking out communications infrastructure in Iraq was our first target in the Gulf War.

That’s probably also be true of a number of major military powers, but I’d be particularly confident of the US’s ability to knock out communications.

I was reading an article from a retired Navy officer a while back where he was talking about how submarine cables were vulnerable, and he pointed out that in past wars, we’ve destroyed them, and should also assume that an opponent would do the same.