[kictanet] Syria shuts down Internet? How can we stop this from happening again?

[Walubengo J]

Rigia,

You paper/analysis does cover the the policy and technical aspects for a redundant (always on) interent service in a given economy. Basically a liberalized internet market with multiple points of connection to the Internet Backbone (read the North and increasingly Asia Pacific region) should be enough to ensure that once and as soon as one international link goes down another one takes over.

But over and above the technical redundancy above, one must have the political redundancy to allow for these redundant links to exchange information.  China for example does have multiple redundant links to the Internet Backbone but can decide within a minute to block incoming and outgoing data. And they can do it in a very clever, sophisticated way (using software that provides limited/filtered internet ) as opposed to the crude way (switch off power or just vandalize the ISPs) approach that is common in African/Arabic economies.

In a seperate example, you will find that even where there is political redundancy (read democracy) the temptation to switch off the internet is never far away (ref: US vs Wikileaks?).  So I think the quest for an Internet that can never be switched off is one that can never be achieved. Someone, somewhere will always be able to switch off the Net.  

And beneath the ongoing ITU/WCIT negotiations (what negotiators wont put on the table, the hidden cards :-)  you just have to decide whether that someone is the UN, the Government, the Private Sector, the Civil Society, the Academia or some hybrid of the above :-)

walu.


From: Warigia Bowman <warigia at gmail.com>
To: jwalu at yahoo.com 
Cc: KICTAnet ICT Policy Discussions <kictanet at lists.kictanet.or.ke> 
Sent: Friday, November 30, 2012 5:54 AM
Subject: [kictanet] Syria shuts down Internet? How can we stop this from happening again?
 

Dear Kictanet List, 


Please see the work by Jean Camp and Warigia Bowman on how to "Protect the Internet from Dictators: Technical and Policy Solutions to Ensure Online Freedoms. This paper is particularly timely given today's events, since Syria is one of the countries we analyze. Can you please help us to figure out what technology we missed, or in what areas our analysis could be improved? Many thanks. 

You can find and download our work here

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2101677

Here is the permalink 

http://ssrn.com/abstract=2101677

***************************************************************************************

Please see ISOC's statement below. 

http://www.internetsociety.org/news/internet-society-syria%E2%80%99s-internet-shutdown

Sincerely, Rigia

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