I don’t understand this quote which I’ve heard 1Mx. I’m not aware of any layer or protocol in networks that have a concept of damage. There is such a thing as failover links but they’re very rare for most layers of the network and certainly not unique to the Internet, they definitely have nothing to do with censorship which is the version of the quote I see the most.
It's a misquote. The actual comment was made about USENET, not the Internet, in response to an incident at Stanford. This was the "rec.humor.funny" incident, in the late 1980s.[1] Someone at Stanford (Ralph Gorin, an IT manager?) had blocked some USENET groups from entering the campus USENET network. But there was a faculty member who had a low-bandwidth connection to the outside world, and ran a USENET node. USENET works by syncing; when two nodes talk, they exchange any missing messages in any groups they both support. USENET nodes often connected by dialing each other with dial-up modems every hour or so. Some low-bandwidth connection automatically copied across the missing censored messages. So, USENET really did treat censored messages as lost data to be transmitted over another path.
John Gilmore is generally credited with saying this about the Internet around 1993, but he acknowledges was originally made about USENET.[2]
If anyone can find Stanford SU-SCORE archives for the 1980s, the original source is probably in there.
I should've put an emoticon. It was a play on the old saying about trying to censor on the Internet. In this case, it was trying to "shut down the Internet", and "the Internet" popped right back on.
