Richard, I ran a network for a dozen years. No, I'm simply stating a fact, not getting smart-ass with you.

Yes, an ISP can shut down or block something. But the nodes that make up the Internet are designed to find another route around the non-functioning node.

People tend to think of the Internet as a point-to-point telephone-like system. It's not. Here's a map of the ARPANET as of March, 1977. It was simple then. A satellite uplink from, say, London to Rutgers to MIT to Moffett Air Force Base to Hawai'i -- or any other route to get from here to there. Any one or more of those links could shut down and the net would still function. It is the same today, only much more complex -- several hundred orders of magnitude so.

If you use a PC, try this: Open your Start menu and click on "Run". Type in "tracert www.mudcat.org" (no quotes, of course) and see how many nodes your signal goes through, and how quickly, to get from you to the 'Cat servers. Do it again in a half an hour and see if the route or number of nodes you go through changes; it almost certainly will. When you get three or more lines of asterix you'll know that you've bumped up against the firewall and that you're there. ("tracert" means "trace route" for all you non-geeks out there.) Try this for various other places around the world. It's the best way I know to get a grasp for how big the Internet actually is.

As I said earlier, the World Wide Web (WWW) is not the Internet -- the WWW is information stored on individual servers connected by the Internet. Even much of that information is archived -- you can see what a website looked like (although not, perhaps, view its content) at the Internet archive.