On Thursday January 27, the Egyptian government did something extraordinary--it "turned off the internet" within the country's own borders. There's no mystery about how this happened -- the Egyptian government owns the largest service provider in the country and had only to make a few phone calls to bring the remaining ISPs in line.
The old fashioned nature of this technological shutdown -- human beings switching off Border Gateway Protocol routers at the point of a gun, more or less -- suggests that Egypt's leadership has yet to consider the consequences of such an act, economic and otherwise.
Destruction of your own increasingly-vital communications infrastructure is known as the Dictator's Dilemma. It's a concept explored by economist and later secretary of state George Shultz, and was born in a very different era--the mid-80's ascent to power of Gorbachev, who is reported to have been directly influenced by the notion that an increasingly information-dependent economy could not thrive when information itself was prevented from flowing freely within and outside a country.
Again and again, from Myanmar to Iran, the Internet has demonstrated an ability to facilitate the organization of social and political protest, if not revolution. Countries wishing to avoid its facility for aiding organized resistance, such as Cuba, are forced to forgo the benefits of an information society altogether.
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