Blocking the net in Egypt

The Egyptian government shut down the Internet, mobile communications and satellite television, but it didn't stop the revolution. By that point, on January 28, the revolution had gained too much momentum. Mass protests for the 28th had already been announced to start after صلاة الجمعة. On that day, thousands immediately took to the streets following noon prayers, gathering more and more protestors until their numbers reached scores, if not hundreds, of thousands in Cairo.

Too Late?
But what if the government had shut down communications earlier? Would it have prevented the revolution from reaching critical mass? Would Egyptians have figured out a way around it?
If the Egyptian government had cut off communications earlier, on the first day of major protests– January 25– for example, maybe it could have delayed the revolution, but it would not have stopped it. Seeing the thousands of protesters on the streets was enough to garner more supporters. One must not forget that Egypt witnessed some 3,000 labor protests since 2004, according to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. January 25 onward has been an extension of those movements.

Unlike their contemporaries in Tunisia or Syria, for example, Egyptians did not face much Internet censorship. Social networking and video websites have been open to the public. Although bloggers have been arrested and abused, their blogs still remained accessible. Despite this, Egyptians would have found a way around censorship. They have certainly faced more difficult barriers from an oppressive government and shameful economic conditions. And when the Internet was shut off, a new way to post on Twitter appeared, such as the Tweet to Speak program of calling in tweets by leaving a message on an international number.
Discussing 'what ifs' is moot–not only because the regime acted differently–but because the government could not have shut off communications. This could have crippled the economy.
The first two days of the revolution, the Egyptian stock market lost billions. It's not sure why the stock market remained open, but if it wasn't to give time for investors with deep ties to the government to pull out their money, then at least it was from the idea that shutting down the stock market–like shutting down communications and banking–is inconceivable in the modern age. Although Egypt's government and sections of the private sector work in a large, antiquated bureaucracy that still rely on fax machines and face to face interaction, cutting off communications could have a crippling effect. It's not coincidental then, that communications cut on a Friday, which is not a business day.
Noam Cohen of the NY Times recently interviewed me about the impact of shutting down technology, particularly the Internet. He wondered if Egyptians' lack of a computer hacking culture was the reason why they could not get around the cuts in the Internet. Firstly, I don't know if Egypt has a hacking community or not, simply because I'm not connected to that world. I don't think it's safe to assume that either it does or does not exist, but I would tend to think that just like everywhere in the world, there probably is some hacker community.

Secondly, hacking or software would have had little impact on the Internet outage. The issue was a matter of engineering rather than programming. The government likely cut off the by severing the physical connections of the Internet itself. As Cohen's colleagues point out in "Egypt Leaders Found ‘Off’ Switch for Internet," the state-run monopoly on landline telephony, Telecom Egypt (TE), oversees Internet routing through its infrastructure based on Ramses Street. TE distributes the Internet routing to its branches around the country, each known as a "centrale." Therefore, the state needed to only cut off the Internet by flipping the switches on the routers at each centrale. No amount of hacking could have stopped that. And as Cohen's colleagues also point out, the Egyptian state managed to cut off the country to the outside because it controls the underground and undersea cables that run through the country's territory–and connect the world to the Internet.

These points make it all the more relevant to end the state-run monopoly of Telecom Egypt. Not that censorship disappears through private ownership. The Egyptian mobile operators capitulated to government demands to shut off mobiles on January 28. In the USA, AT&T cooperated with the NSA in unwarranted spying on millions of Americans. As such I can't argue that privatization would be the solution to this, but that an end to a monopoly on communications would decrease the chances of controlling citizens' right to free expression.