[governance] Egypt and Internet Governance

[McTim]

On Sun, Jan 30, 2011 at 12:12 PM, Roland Perry
<roland at internetpolicyagency.com> wrote:
> In message <C96B527E.15C5D%ian.peter at ianpeter.com>, at 17:38:06 on Sun, 30
> Jan 2011, Ian Peter <ian.peter at ianpeter.com> writes
>>
>> To me the first basic rule in these situations is that companies should be
>> required and should agree to act only on judicial orders, not to political
>> pressure.
>
> And what if the Judge has no choice but to rubber-stamp a piece of paper
> where the government is declaring (under laws previously drawn up by
> politicians) that it's a national emergency?

a fair point.

In this case, however, I am very curious as to HOW the Egyptian gov't
managed to shutdown all Internet services in the space of 25 minutes.
I think they either sent many squads of boyz to pull the plugs on
every router in every data center/ISP rack (unlikely given Cairo's
traffic chaos) OR they had a script ready to run that telnetted into
each BGP speaker and shut them down one by one.  I don't think it
likely that a series of phone calls in the middle of the night would
have the effect we saw, rather such a series of phone calls would have
seen routes withdrawn over a period of many hours, not minutes.

In other words, I don't think vodafone or any of the other providers
were happy to pull the plug.

-- 
Cheers,

McTim
"A name indicates what we seek. An address indicates where it is. A
route indicates how we get there."  Jon Postel
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