Egypt Turns Off the Internet. Now What Happens?

On Thursday January 27, the Egyptian government did something extraordinary -- it "turned off the Internet" within the country's own borders. There's no mystery about how this happened -- the Egyptian government owns the largest service provider in the country and had only to make a few phone calls to bring the remaining ISPs in line. The old fashioned nature of this technological shutdown -- human beings switching off Border Gateway Protocol routers at the point of a gun, more or less -- suggests that Egypt's leadership has yet to consider the consequences of such an act, economic and otherwise. Destruction of your own increasingly-vital communications infrastructure is known as the Dictator's Dilemma. It's a concept explored by economist and later secretary of state George Shultz, and was born in a very different era--the mid-80's ascent to power of Gorbachev, who is reported to have been directly influenced by the notion that an increasingly information-dependent economy could not thrive when information itself was prevented from flowing freely within and outside a country.