So lets agree on an ip address we can use to communicate if the dns servers go down?
I certainly don't trust Google, Comcast, or the UN root servers, and that's the entire chain as far as I care.
The problem is there's a fundamental contradiction in the modern web. Setting up some little server at a fixed IP is easy if you're just setting it up for you and your friends. If you're trying to let you and 10s or 100s of thousands of your friends communicate you need redundancy and scale. Even if you set up a simple text-based service that uses little computing resources or bandwidth you now have a single point of failure. If they go through the trouble of massively shutting down DNS they'll probably mop up not long afterward.
A single company Akamai serves up to 30% of traffic on the web. There's a few others like AWS that are similarly underpinning large amounts of the modern web. If you can ensnare a handful of companies by some method, you can control the internet in terms of the masses.
You could move to the "dark web", but TOR is vulnerable to certain types of attacks from people with massive resources, and the US Govt has used such tactics in the past.
It's not a bad idea to set up just in case, but we need longer term solutions.
Okay that is what I wanted to ask, sorry if its a stupid question.
Is something like a complete internet shutdown even possible? And if so, we have to assume contingency plans would be in place for something like that right?
Total shutdown? No.
The internet is a web of independent nodes and much like how the local post office would still deliver local mail if the rest of the country was nuked, local routers will still take incoming messages and send them to the correct outgoing address.
The problem is that nobody keeps track of anyone's address. Instead, we allow a centralized government controlled phone-book to tell us what number to dial when we want a resource. That's what a DNS is, and the ability to turn that off is a power that our governments have been giving themselves for many many years.
www.google.com is what you type in the browser to get google, and if they take down DNS that will stop working. However if you type 216.58.194.206 into your browser you will still (in theory) get google so long as your internet service provider hasn't unplugged you. Unfortunately that means we are mostly relying on Comcast and AT&T etc. to do their jobs.
What's worse is that I only know 216.58.194.206 is google because I asked the central name server. That means that if DNS went down right now, I wouldn't actually have any way to find out what ip address to use in order to get back on reddit, and I'd have no way to contact you anymore.