Firstly, the President already has the power to control all forms of communications by virtue of the Communications Act of 1934. The best suggestion I’d have for you is to do a little research on BGP - Border Gateway Protocol. What BGP does is ‘advertise’ the local IP address prefixes of backbone providers (e.g. Quest, AT&T, etc) to neighboring networks. Big ISPs propagate the address IDs of their customers (e.g local ISPs who buy their bandwidth from them) to their neighbors so that eventually all ISPs know all other ISPs’ prefixes. This enables routers to know where to send packets with a given destination address.
The “Kill Switch” would basically remove US-based IP addresses from the routing tables of BGP routers around the world. This means that routers no longer know where to send packets addressed to US IP addresses — even though all the physical connections are still intact.
I think an interesting plot twist would be the “what if” - what if one smart techie finds a way to open a pathway, maybe through HF radio or some older wireline link that isn’t monitored. Even if it were slow, he’d be like the one-eyed man in a land of the blind...
Good luck with your research, it’s clearly a timely topic.
Read more: http://techland.time.com/2011/01/28/how-egypt-cut-off-the-internet/2/#ixzz1q6MU4j00
For every barrier, there’s a workaround. Some genius tinkering away in some garage somewhere in the world is probably working it out right now.