[kictanet] In egypt-internet governance

[warigia bowman]

Here is a good article on shutdown of net in Egypt.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/16/technology/16internet.html?ref=world

However, I still find it technically confusing. Can the engineers among us
again please review for the social scientists what happened here precisely?

*Quoting*

"One of the government’s strongest levers is Telecom
Egypt<http://www.telecomegypt.com.eg/english/index.asp>,
a state-owned company that engineers say owns virtually all the country’s
fiber-optic cables; other Internet service providers are forced to lease
bandwidth on those cables in order to do business.".[ . . . .]

"Yet despite this decentralized design, the reality is that most traffic
passes through vast centralized exchanges — potential choke points that
allow many nations to monitor, filter or in dire cases completely stop the
flow of Internet data." .[ .. . . ]

"There has been intense debate both inside and outside Egypt on whether the
cutoff at 26 Ramses Street was accomplished by surgically tampering with the
software mechanism that defines how networks at the core of the Internet
communicate with one another, or by a blunt approach: simply cutting off the
power to the router computers that connect Egypt to the outside world." [ .
. . . ]

"Over the next five days, the government furiously went about extinguishing
nearly all of the Internet links to the outside world that had survived the
first assault, data collected by Western network monitors show. Although a
few Egyptians managed to post to Facebook or send sporadic e-mails, the vast
majority of the country’s Internet subscribers were cut off." [ . . .. ]
*
This is a bit clearer *

"Individual Internet service providers were also called on the carpet and
ordered to shut down, as they are required to do by their licensing
agreements if the government so decrees.

According to an Egyptian engineer and an international telecom expert who
both spoke on the condition of anonymity, at least one provider,
Vodafone<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/business/companies/vodafone_group_plc/index.html?inline=nyt-org>,
expressed extreme reluctance to shut down but was told that if it did not
comply, the government would use its own “off” switch via the Telecom Egypt
infrastructure — a method that would be much more time-consuming to reverse.
Other exchanges, like an important one in Alexandria, may also have been
involved.

Still, even major providers received little notice that the moves were
afoot, said an Egyptian with close knowledge of the telecom industry who
would speak only anonymously.

“You don’t get a couple of days with something like this,” he said. “It was
less than an hour.”" [ . . . .]


On Thu, Feb 3, 2011 at 8:05 PM, Barrack Otieno <otieno.barrack at gmail.com>wrote:

> Interesting turn of events , sovereignty at play :-).
>
> Best Regards
>
> On Thu, Feb 3, 2011 at 2:07 PM, Wamuyu Gatheru <wamuyu at soko-id.co.ke>wrote:
>
>>
>> The service providers were basically asked to shut down or loose their
>> licenses. A couple days ago the companies argued that protests were taking
>> place in even a bigger way without the internet and even phones.
>> Incidentally even public transport across the country was shut down. I think
>> all is back today after shameful 'Mungiki' type violence.
>>
>> --
>> Soko ID Co. Ltd
>> Tel: +254 (0)721 468699
>> http://www.soko-id.co.ke/
>>
>> Soko ID is an innovative company that supports public organisations and
>> promotes the Kenyan heritage on the internet.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> Quoting warigia bowman <warigia at gmail.com>:
>>
>>  In el rehab, cairo at american university
>>>
>>> gov shut down all texting and Internet as well as al jazeera arabic from
>>> Thursday until this afternoon. Food for thought
>>>
>>> what is the technical situation? How did government of egypt do this? Is
>>> gateway controlled by gov, or did gov pull licenses?
>>>
>>> need answers
>>>
>>> Rigia
>>> --
>>>  Dr. Warigia Bowman
>>> Visiting Assistant Professor
>>> American University in Cairo
>>>
>>>
>>
>>
>>
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>
>
>
> --
> Barrack O. Otieno
> Afriregister Ltd (Kenya)
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-- 
Dr. Warigia Bowman
Visiting Assistant Professor
American University in Cairo
Global Affairs and Public Policy
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