Why Egypt Shut Down the Internet

February 02, 2011

We have seen this story before: an authoritarian regime is challenged by its youthful population. TV stations are shut down, border security is strengthened, and the government tightly regulates the flow of information out of the country.

The protests that followed a disputed 2009 election in Iran were among the first examples of a ruling regime's monopoly on mass information being challenged by new Internet communication tools. Suddenly, the protesters were on Twitter, Facebook, and other social networking sites, sharing detailed information about what was happening, directly as they saw it. They detailed the violence and the rage, the hope for change and the despair of their comrades. This burst of information was such a surprising event that those outside Iran didn't know how to channel the influx of information, and those inside Iran weren't able to fully turn off the spigot.

In Egypt today we see a similar situation evolving. However, instead of blocking access to social networking sites, like we saw in Iran, Egypt simply pulled the plug on the Internet, something that many thought wasn't possible. Renesys, an organization which monitors global web traffic, said that "this is a completely different situation from the modest internet manipulation that took place in Tunisia...or Iran, where the internet stayed up in a rate-limited form designed to make internet connectivity painfully slow. The Egyptian government's actions tonight have essentially wiped their country from the global map."[1]

How the authorities managed to disconnect from the Internet is still somewhat shrouded in mystery at this point. Given the Egyptian authorities' centralized control and relatively limited number of internet providers, it appears that they demanded that the four central internet providers (Link Egypt, Vodafone/Raya, Telecom Egypt, Etisalat Misr) essentially pull the plug in one coordinated effort. Within minutes, "approximately 3,500 individual BGP [border gateway protocol] routes were withdrawn, leaving no valid paths by which the rest of the world could continue to exchange Internet traffic with Egypt's service providers."[2]

But can they truly hope to contain that information for even a limited period of time? Even though Egypt took more extreme measures than Iran or Tunisia, people found work-arounds: dial-up internet connections based outside of Egypt were still working, some organizations faxed information into universities and other companies, and landline telephones still worked,  with evidence to suggest that people called friends in other countries, asking them to post information on their behalf.

The protest movements in Egypt, Tunisia, and Iran, are examples of an important new political trend: revolutions finding homes and allies both on the streets and on the Web. Both the Egyptian and Iranian experiences share several commonalities that may provide a guide for assessing the possibility of future social networking revolutions. First, both Egypt and Iran are countries with youthful populations, with an average age of 24. To them, Internet access and social networking have become a normal part of daily life, no longer a privilege for the affluent. This is becoming the case in many developing countries, even those where Internet connectivity is not as widespread or stable.

Second, in countries where bloggers are routinely harassed by police, as we saw with the four-year detention of Egyptian blogger Abdel Kareem Nabil, it provides a safe place to congregate when face to face meetings are not possible.

Third, social networks provide a direct feed to those outside those countries looking in, providing a real-time sense of hope, fear, and despair, and exposing the truth about current events that may or may not be getting attention from government-owned media entities.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, it allows its users to remain, for the most part, anonymous. Rallies can be organized and protests can be highlighted without requiring a central leader whose arrest could deflate the protest. However, governments are not inept: they are learning to make social networking work for them, and they can and do attempt to identify users based on their ISP address.

Access to social media should not be seen as a metric for a revolution's success, but the attention that it can bring to the critical issues, both internally and internationally, can help to keep support levels high.

Turning off the Internet, as Egypt has done could backfire in terms of its relations with other countries. The idea of an American ally objectively cutting off its country from the rest of the world is contrary to American foreign policy. As President Obama said during his YouTube interview following the State of the Union, "I think that it is very important that people have mechanisms in order to express legitimate grievances...there are certain core values that we believe in as Americans that we believe are universal: freedom of speech, freedom of expression, people being able to use social networking or any other mechanisms to communicate with each other and express their concerns. And I think that is no less true in the Arab world than it is here in the United States."

How will this revolution play out? It is too early to tell how events of the last week will impact Egypt in the long-term, but chances are that we will have a front row tweet to the action.

Photo Credit: "Arabic Blaqckberry" by Danny McL, 2010

http://www.flickr.com/photos/dmcl/5226911233/

[1] "Condemnation over Egypt's internet shutdown" Financial Times, 28 January 2011.

[2] "Egypt Leaves the Internet" Renesys Blog, 27 January 2011.