[governance] Egypt and Internet Governance

[Roland Perry]

In message 
<AANLkTimuKg-96H=txyzUwkmu1YHDDodis_w7vkJVGuSu at mail.gmail.com>, at 
12:24:59 on Sun, 30 Jan 2011, McTim <dogwallah at gmail.com> writes
>> 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seen routes withdrawn over a period of many hours, not minutes.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.

If you want to discuss Egypt (I didn't particularly) then it has all the 
hallmarks of a detailed and pre-prepared contingency plan being 
activated. And I don't think any organisation (whether they are 45% 
owned by the government or not) likes having to activate contingency 
plans - some don't even like the work of having to design them.

History (which includes opinion on whether what was done was a "good or 
bad thing") tends to be written by the winning side, and we are probably 
some way from knowing who that's going to be.
-- 
Roland Perry
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