It is not clear what Donald Trump actually meant on Monday when he conjured up the idea of getting Bill Gates to help “close up” the Internet.
Mr. Trump hasn’t elaborated yet, and Mr. Gates, who stepped down as Microsoft’s chairman last year, is spending most of his days at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
However, since he remains a technology adviser to the company’s current chief executive, Satya Nadella, you could imagine Mr. Gates returning to Redmond, Wash., where Microsoft is based, and the two of them going down into the basement at Microsoft HQ and pulling the plug.
The problem is that the Internet’s backbone doesn’t run through Redmond, and it never did.
There was a time, of course, in the 1990s when it seemed as if Microsoft ran the Internet, when the company got into antitrust trouble with the United States Justice Department. But that was business control — to an extent. It was never technical control.
In 1993, John Gilmore, a freedom-of-speech activist and one of the founders of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, was quoted as saying, “The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.”
He was referring to the basic design of a computer network that was intended to have no central control and no single point of failure. There is no one plug to pull or server to block. That decentralized structure has created headaches for anyone trying to control communications in cyberspace.
Of course, Mr. Trump was probably not asking Mr. Gates to shut down the Internet, but looking for some way to deny it to the Islamic State and its allies as a propaganda and communications tool.
Mr. Trump’s suggestion touches upon a long-running debate regarding the Internet and censorship. Instead of Bill Gates, he might receive better advice from Li Keqiang, the prime minister of China, which has put a great deal of energy into “closing up” the Internet, including barring electronic distribution of The New York Times.
Perhaps an anti-Islamic State wall — a bit like China’s “Great Firewall” that controls Internet traffic in and out of the country — would be the perfect companion to Mr. Trump’s proposal for a physical wall along the United States’ southern border.
Mr. Trump could benefit from reading “Shockwave Rider,” a 1975 science fiction novel written by John Brunner. Mr. Brunner’s novel is best known for coining the term “worm” for a malicious computer program that could move under its own power from computer to computer via a network.
Computer worms became widely known in the real world in 1988 when a young computer science graduate student, Robert Tappan Morris, let one loose and — because of a programming error — briefly created a monumental traffic jam that brought the Internet, then brand new, briefly to its knees.
Mr. Brunner’s novel imagines a totalitarian government that exercises its power through a computer network that gives it control over the population. In the novel, the protagonist, who is a member of a rebel group, lets the worm loose in the network, putting the government in a bind. The only way it can destroy the worm is to bring down the network and in the process undermine its power.
If that were done to the real Internet, bringing down the network might displease Mr. Trump, who at last count had 5.15 million followers on Twitter.