This seems less of a dream or vision in terms of predictions and more of a hunch. The fracturing wont be things like firewalls put up by various countries themselves to limit the flow of information. Nor is it a hard shutdown of the internet. Rather it is the result of an information powerplay that creates different versions of the internet overlapping and interleaved amongst parts of the original. In terms of cyberwarfare and what it does to network integrity, this would be like "pushing the big button".

That is, its based on what might be possible in terms of activity and is related to spontaneous traffic outages with major hubs going down and such before being brought back online. The supposed ongoing attack on "conspriacy/fringe sites" might be one of them. What will happen is that cyberwarfare will target various backbone networks and domain servers specifically to control the flow of information and public perception of mass media. Various websites will be crawled, cloned, modified and presented as fronts for dissemination of controlled information (both in terms of releasing truth, covering it up, or trying to spread lies) or as man-in-the-middle vectors for trojan style attacks. This is because once key parts of the internet are compromised, it is possible to perform redirects - Joe Public wont know what server he's going to if it still looks like the place he's been going to. Thus by doing so you get to affect what he sees and possibly what information he could be led to believe.

Some of the stuff isn't just hacks from the outside either. There are people who may be considered disgruntled with the status quo with access to physical hardware that will open backdoors for their friends and give keys to unauthorized people. These keys are considered restricted to government agencies. It's the kind of stuff that is dubious in nature to begin with and is supposed to remain secret, but trusted in the hands of IT staff with no real loyalty to the organizations they work for. Various uses of botnets and cloud computing and such will also provide distributed hosting space for virtual servers, clones, mirrors, honeypots, etc.

So depending on how you route through jumps and such on the network you might see "natural internet" (one we were familiar with before this particular cyberwarfare game starts), "Group A's internet", "Group B's internet", etc.

If this indeed happens, we'll know "It's on!" when we see unusal information being presented at major online media outlets. Government and corporate sites will be "hacked" or defaced and restored to normal at a whim while admins scratch their heads trying to figure it out. (Because it's not the actual site being messed with, but a clone on a redirect.) Wikileaks might seem trivial in comparision. Either stuff the government doesn't want us to know, other information that should be private, or information that seems contradictory to what is already known and feels inherently false.

Of course if this gets bad enough, some officials may want to turn the internet off. However the result of that may be more disruptive than putting up with an obviously compromised information system. People will definitely freak out if that happens.

Of course this could be a dumb prediction, but you never know...

Interesting but absolutely unrealistic.

Sure, you can clone a website, even though cloning a forum like ATS without access to the database is a futile endeavour. But let's pretend here for a second they clone ATS and also have the full database with all accounts and content.

Now what ? Replace every major poster and mod and admin with a CIA agent ? How are you suggesting they clone the members or at least the majority of them. And even if they managed to install a couple shills, what use does it have if they don't start preventing information from being disseminated. And they moment they start doing that, the people will realize something is fishy.

Nah. The past has proven that the already implemented propaganda measures through mainstream media do their job just fine. The only place to post and read information that does not go conform with what the media says, are conspiracy websites. That's good enough for them.

Originally posted by HumanitiesLastHope
...sounds like Cispa and Sopa, there endgame is full control

BINGO!... Sounds like we have a winner!
But considering all that the public doesn't know or isn't fully aware of, multiple hacking groups would be playing king-of-the-hill in terms of controlling or breaking the tools used to do this. Many parties involved and with stakes in this: Fed/NATO, China, Russia, Anon, whatever the corporate mercenary du jour is, organized crime, etc. The internet using public could be in for some interesting times.