Although there is no single switch that shuts down the Internet as a whole, does the incident in Egypt indicate that the Net can be turned off in small segments?
Think of the Internet infrastructure within any particular country as being an ecosystem. There are a bunch of coordinating organizations—legal, financial, contractual—that work together within this ecosystem. If you look at a complex system such as those in the United States or Canada, you might ask, "How many phone calls would I have to make to shut it down?" It probably wouldn't be possible. Most of the people you would call operate independent of the government and wouldn't even listen to you. In a place like Egypt there's a lot less diversity in that ecosystem. There were just a few key providers, they're all licensed by the government. They have to do what the government says, and they have to operate within the law of the local telecommunications regulatory framework. And so in this case they did what they were asked to.
So the sheer size of the U.S.'s infrastructure works to the Internet's advantage, and a shutdown such as the one in Egypt could not happen here?
I'll speculate. There is no standing legal authority to be exercised and no kill switch. Probably, the government would make a request, and an ISP would say, "That's interesting," and send it to legal. Legal would send it upstairs, there would be consultation, there would be calls back and forth, there would be injunctions levied, there would be lawsuits, and the ISP wouldn't get shut down. This process would take a long time.
If the laws were changed so that there were a clear-cut legal authority and a plan to control the Internet, then anything is possible. But I certainly don't think that the industry in most countries on Earth would stand to have that kind of power dangled over their heads. It would do incredible violence to the companies economically, and it would do even greater economic violence to the country.
The network that handles the stock exchange in Egypt was not affected. What does that mean?
My team is studying exceptions to the Internet blockage; there are a few. We're trying to figure out what they have in common. This was the obvious pattern—the Noor Group did come out basically unscathed. One speculation is that they got the phone call from the government, and they chose not to listen. Another speculation says that they didn't receive the phone call, because there was an agreement to let them stay online because they host the stock exchange, among other things. There's no way to know at this time really.
What else are you and your team keeping an eye on as you monitor the situation?
We're watching very closely to find out what will happen when, in effect, the whole country has to be rebooted, something that has never happened at this scale before. We'll see whether the relationships and networking routes that existed before the problem are resumed afterward or there are structural changes. I suspect they could bring it back up pretty much the way it was when it went down. Existing contractual relations—who pays whom and how much—are all pretty much in place. One significant change could be that companies operating on the Web start looking for ways to diversify how they access the Web. This could mean creating relationships with international carriers and even purchasing additional satellite Internet bandwidth, figuring that they should have one service provider that is not immediately under government control.
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16 Comments
Add CommentI suggest that an investigation start at the likely single point of control or failure: how many telecommunications companies are there in Egypt - one?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt's quite possible that all Egyptian ISPs simply rent terrestrial bandwidth from a single government controlled telecommunications company. Someone might have to walk around to several devices to interrupt all ISP accesses, but control might have been more easily exercised than is imagined.
Satellite links may be another matter...
Does anyone remember the purpose of the VOA?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhat if that agency is repurposed or perhaps another new agency that could provide, at least, spot access to the internet in a wireless/satellite capacity in these circumstances.
The internet has become a tool for freedom and we must support it in countries like Egypt with a similar drive that we used in the VOA program.
Further details would help to piece together the exact way the cut-off was implemented.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisDid International IP transit providers providing service in Egypt like Verizon see the BGP session, the IP protocol or link layer go down on their router Interfaces facing Egyptian ISPs?
Are ISPs within Egypt still able to see routes from each other?
The author speculates that the internet infrastructure is too large in the US to be controlled by the government. However, in the case of Julian Assange someone in the government was able to apply enough pressure to force several ISP's to refuse to provide service, as well as fore several large corporations to refuse to provide credit/debit service to Assange. The federal government took these actions behind the scenes, without any legal proceedings. It seems we are closer to government control of our internet service that the author indicates.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhen I see an electronic network called an "ecosystem," I think alt.cliche.puke.puke.puke
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThink of it instead as a bunch of boxes with wires going in and out carrying an electronic signal. Flick a switch on the boxes, no more signal in or out. Apparently, the problem in Egypt is a. (known)effective dictatorship, b. (apparently)few enough boxes so that an order to flick the switches can be carried out quickly.
Any country could do that. You know how you can get your internet shut off for non-payment? An ISP could easily shut off everyone at the flick of switch; AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, Quest, etc. could all decide to suddenly stop serving US customers, and the internet would effectively be shut down in the US. This isn't a "new level of control", it's the oldest, and by far the easiest to implement.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt is much harder to filter content using a firewall than it is to pull the Ethernet plug. If you're wondering how that works, try both.
So much for the people using cloud computing. No thank you.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThis is just more proof that the only safe internet is as widely decentralized an internet as possible. There ought to be millions of possible connections entering and leaving every country.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe internet here is in big trouble with the consolidation of ISPs down to just a hand full. I would mostly blame the 1996 telecommunications act, which cut off telecoms requirement to allow competitors to collocate equipment at their central offices and only pay the same prices that the telecoms charged their own internal business units.
We can do something about this, by breaking up the large phone and cable companies, and also not allowing any company in the business of laying the cables or building any kind of infrastructure to be in any other business, such as running any equipment that goes on the network, or any service of any kind. That should be freely left to any competitors who would like to upgrade and/or offer services of their own, using the general infrastructure.
We need to develop the next generation of internet, which would more resemble a mesh, or a fishnet of connections, where any given node on the network including that of an end user is connected to multiple nodes at any given moment.
Redundancy and decentralization are our friends, and the enemies of tyrants and monopolies the world round.
That learn us to don't throw away our old analog dialup-modem's. With a dialup-modem we could always connect to Internet through other countries. That is what the egypts are doing now.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisFor us others this is a tip to get backup connections to Internet through dialup access to our nearest neighbour countries.
To learn more please read the latest info about dialup connections and modem pools around the world: http://werebuild.eu/wiki/Egypt/Main_Page
another alternative is to move towards a mesh network...where each node can receive and transmit to and from many...not high bandwidth but very fault(regime) tolerant;-)...I think the one laptop per child computer had this ability built in....
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIsn't it strange. Any time people start using the Democracy and Freedom governments often say they lust after for purposes the governments don't like, Democracy and Freedom become tools for evil malcontents (this goes for the US too, think the Lasagne/Wikileaks saga.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"We had to destroy Democracy and Freedom to save them."
And as regards Egypt, isn't is strange that the governments of the US and the EU have suddenly discovered how wonderful Democracy and Freedom might be for Egyptians, after 30 years of robust support for the Mubarak regime during which they were busy stuffing his pockets with money and arming him to the gills.
Great article, by the way, answering a question a lot of us are asking ourselves right now.
Right enternewid! I'm sure those contemplating the cloud got a wake-up call, although, I can't figure out why clouds dire consequences were not immediately apparent at the onset of that idea. Sounds similar to what b2b tried to do in early 2000s and failed.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt looks like just over 5 million people in Egypt have lost access to their facebook accounts with the recent shutdown.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thishttp://www.datagenetics.com/blog/february12011/index.html
Up until this event, facebook registrations were growing rapidly in Egypt (doubling in the last year alone).
Here in Australia we have an even greater potential problem. We have a control freak called Senator Stephen Conroy who wants to implement tools to filter the Internet (ostensibly to control pornography) together with the implementation of the whole of country National Broadband Network under the control of a private company owned by the government.part of this proposal is forced disposal of the existing telecommunications network infrastructure to the government-controlled company. However being owned by the government does not make it subject to Freedom of information legislation so all its internal activities are secret. Consequently one government minister could presumably not only seek to control politically undesirable Internet content, but could if it wanted to turn the whole thing off. That is why many Australians are fearful of both proposals.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhat has happened in Egypt's is an indication of what a corrupt government (does anyone know a government which is not corrupt) could do in the future in this country.
Twitter has allowed continued interaction between participants.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisGuess where theres a will, there's a way...
Hopefully the spirit of democracy will not be thwarted in a similar way in our country in times of dissent.
It happened before. The whole internet was cut off in Xinjiang in west China (size of 1/6 USA with 21 million people) for 10 months after riots on 15 July 2009. Mobiles text message was cut too. Stock Exchange was also exempted.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThere was a story of a couple who make a living by selling local food online has to drive 1000+ km to go to a internet cafe in the next province.
http://blog.jianghu.taobao.com/u/NDc2MTQ1OTM=/blog/blog_detail.htm?aid=25084780 (in Chinese, pls use google translation)