Given electricity, you could set up your own internet in your neighborhood and communicate with your neighbors. It's just that we've handed over that intercommunication to the ISPs, but we could actually do it ourselves. It's built into the system. It's open source and free.

And your own community internet could communicate with the community on the other side of the river given one wire (or wireless connection). Etc. Etc. Etc. The way it works now is that there are 'backbones' that carry most of the traffic, both data and DNS (domain name system), and these, once targeted, are what would bring the internet down, but it doesn't kill the internet, actually. Just disables it.

Sounds like a good base-line story for your next book - maybe a prequel to the last one? We've discussed before that 'decentralization' is the best panacea to our current predicament, an intra-net would be a logical part of that.

Meanwhile on the Optus outage, the company & gov are denying rumours of a cyber-attack:

The Department of Home Affairs has said there is "no indication" the black-out is the result of a cyber-security attack.

Smacks of the "no evidence" line we heard a million times during Covid when the authorities wanted to cover up whatever the cover-up of the day was. If you don't want something coming out, then don't investigate, ban everybody else from investigating it, then say there's "no evidence"!