Should Governments have an Internet Kill Swtich?

Anti-government protesters use internet on a laptop in Tahrir Square, February. 7, 2011

Egypt shut down the Internet for five days starting from January 28 this year. (Libya tried the same yesterday) But the Internet shutdown in Egypt failed to stop the protests that forced President Hosni Mubarak to resign. But how did the Internet shut down happen?

Craig Labovitz is chief scientist at Arbor Networks says "From a technical standpoint, the popular imagination of the Internet is as a network that can survive nuclear wars, can't be stopped, is everything, everywhere. But the engineering realities are a lot more prosaic. In many countries there are a few natural bottlenecks, whether it be large data centers or right-of-ways."

WIRED says that the Egyptian government shut down most of its country’s internet not by phoning ISPs one at a time, but by simply throwing a switch in a crucial data center in Cairo.

The following slides are from a presentation by Dr Olivier Crepin LeBlond at a forum on Internet and Democracy in Ukraine.

During this talk Olivier emphasized "Clearly, the move of the Egyptian Government cost them nearly $100 Million, plus all of the loss of confidence in the country's outsourcing IT industry, and yet, the ruler was still overthrown, with or without Internet."

Internet freedom is certainly linked to progress.  There is ample economic growth in countries with the most open Internet governance environments, the UK being one example.

Multi-stakeholder governance

View more presentations from Olivier MJ Crépin-Leblond.

.