Yes, my point was the dns isn't the "whole" internet. I know network engineers at some major ISPs that would still find a way to communicate with each other if a genie waved a magic wand and all dns infrastructure worldwide went "poof".

But also my point was that ARIN specifically is vulnerable to USA originated malicious court actions the same as verisign is.

Verisign continually responds to requests. ARIN traditionally doesn't - it just hands out numbers. But we'll see how RPKI makes ARIN more similar to Verisign. ARIN could be ordered to delete RPKI records for an AS, kicking it out of the portion of the internet that checks RPKI records - which also happens to be mandated by the US government.