Brit given the key to the Internet

UK businessman Paul Kane has been selected to form part of an elite “chain of trust” charged with rebooting the web in the event of a catastrophe that sees it having to be shut down, according to Metro.

A new safety system  has been introduced by ICANN (the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) to shut the net down in an emergency, such as world catastrophe, war or terrorist incident.

Mr Kane, of CommunityDNS based at Bath University, is one of six people to have been given a key required to switch critical servers back on.

After a ceremony in a bunker in the US, Mr Kane now says he will keep the key in a safety deposit box.

In a story that clearly sounds like science-fiction it’s worth noting that it’s not actually possible to switch the entire Internet off, but ICANN have developed a system that can shut down some critical systems that would them prevent hackers or fast-spreading malware from causing a data catastrophe.  Controllers of most of the major Internet servers have joined the scheme.

The other keyholders are: Dan Kaminsky of the US; Jiankang Yao from China; Moussa Guebre of Burkina Faso; Bevil Wooding from Trinidad and Tobago; Ondrej Sury of the Czech Republic; and Norm Ritchie of Canada.