On the internet kill switch

From Red State, before the hysteria sets in:

Because you see: the emergency powers sought by the Democrats and the White House not only amount to a huge power grab over private computers that is unprecedented online, but the purported goal still won’t be achieved. The bill is as overbearing in its means as it is impractical in its ends.

Consider the premise of the bill: we have to defend ourselves against a hypothetical attack by a foreign power on this country’s computers over the Internet. It sounds just so reasonable that we should just be able to “shut off the pipe” to country X until the threat passes, doesn’t it? The problem is, there is no one pipe. The Internet is not like the system of roads, centralized and government owned. The Internet is a tangled web of private networks, any or all of the biggest of which (”the Backbone”) might have their own connections to private networks in other countries. Take a look at this diagram of the Internet backbone made by the Opte Project: