Russia can't take out all the "internet cables." Presuming we're talking about undersea cables, there are a fuckton of them. The logistics of taking out even a handful of those before the world takes action is beyond what Russia is capable of pulling off.

Even if they do manage to cut some, traffic would slow down, not stop. Then the cables would be repaired, and everyone would be more pissed at Russia than they already are.

It's nothing more than bluff and bluster. It would be a minor setback for the world, and have huge downsides to Russia.

Almost none of it.

The amount of data flowing through undersea cables around the world is insane compared to the inter-satellite links available.

That being said, a lot of data that you use as a consumer on a daily basis doesn't pass through any undersea cable at all. It's more of a business problem than an individual problem.

The majority of the websites or online services you access are locally hosted on your own continent. Netflix, Facebook, Amazon, etc. all have local servers. Even for video games, most of the traffic is local just due to lag issues caused by too much distance.

What would break? Banking and financial institutions transferring money to or from overseas institutions to complete investments and loans ,Communications (Like e-mailing or calling a factory in China from the US, or contacting your Grandma in Thailand), International shipping, Flight tracking, etc.

While the satellites could take over for some of that, what would likely happen is specific companies would bid up the price for that limited capacity, and less financially valuable uses like being able to look at the latest lemmy posts from European submitters wouldn't work.

I suppose:

1a. that'd be a lot of cables to take out

2b. many cables are terrestrial

3c. Putin would tick off other BRICS members and other countries

4d. ship-to-ship—maybe get some airplanes and balloons involved

5e. American Navy attacks Russian vessels cutting cables, and Biden tells Putin to stop this folly

I'm pretty sure it would result in the US internet being isolated from the rest of the worlds'

Which actually works against Putin since that means his troll farms also get cut off, meaning less new material for the useful idiots to keep other useful idiots freshly indoctrinated with.

A cable-cutting war will be absolutely devastating to the global economy. It's the modern equivalent of Mutually Assured Destruction. There are few viable contingency plans.

I say this as a telecom wonk: hope and pray and vote so that war never comes.

I would imagine that it would be equally devastating to Putin to cut the cables as it would be to anybody else. I want to believe that he’s bluffing, trolling everybody to get their attention and reactions.

Something like 1% of internet traffic is by satellite...

Mid year 2018, maybe it was 2019, there was a massive internet outage. Closest guesstimate to the causes was a truck with their boom up ran through an intersection clipping fiber and power lines, and a fiber bundle was accidentally cut in a separate incident, this was all state side. Internet went down for nearly every ISP, services dead, country wide it was found we don't have redundancy like we thought. You see, when internet lines are built out, the lines are divided up to different owners and leases, those third parties sell backup internet services to major isp's, but no one was checking if the backup was running across the same infrastructure at any point, sales was selling, and the backup lines worked and we never had a full bundle break previously that was carrying main and backup bundles. When this outage happened, it hit Russia as well. Russia had an internet outage because of 2 bunlde breaks in the US. This tells me they are linked to the US network, and might infact be capable of doing multiple nefarious activities that made use of the wide open hole we had in our infrastructure. Now I don't know if our infrastructure was patched, they kept that above most peoples pay grade. But the weakness was there, and it was on display to the entire world plain as day. They could either poison our networks/DNS/routing tables/etc with their high-speed connections, or just use it as a heartbeat to see the success of internet based attacks.

Basically none. The satellite link isn't getting traffic directly between you and the server you are reaching - the satellite just relays the data to the nearest ground station that then uses the normal fibre network to get the rest of the way.

Even if you managed to reconfigure starlink to be a peering network rather than an access network, you'd still have the issue that the starlink network as a whole has orders of magnitude less bandwidth than even one under sea cable

They're not going to take out the internet lol. At least if you're not in Ukraine that is.

oddly enough i think the internet would have to behave in a federated way

content would need to be cached in connected areas and we would need to optimize use of the satellite connections to propagate content between federated islands