Hanging out in the chan threads last night talking about this was a blast. The way Schneier described the events it looked like the DDOS was a distraction for something else. Then I reread the article. You cannot take down global DNS. It's not like the old days where there were only 13 global DNS servers.This database contains public DNS Servers that are reachable by IPv4 or IPv6. Currently there are 55,053 Nameservers from 205 countries in the database.
Link
yeah... you can do dumb haranguing shit to a surprising number of sites - often there will be a slowdown between Google and Amazon which is somebody DDOSing the CDNs, for example - but "killing the internet" is, at this point, a matter of protracted physical violence. not that it couldn't be done. But from my understanding of network security (which is as a layman's, but as a layman's educated by one of the guys that keeps the DOE up) is that quality of service attacks are easier and likelier than denial of service attacks.