Natalie Wolchover
TechNewsDaily
January 30, 2011
To silence dissidents, the Egyptian government made a move Thursday that has no precedent: It turned off the Internet nationwide. How did they do it — and could the same thing happen here?
According to David Clark, an MIT computer scientist whose research focuses on Internet architecture and development, a government’s ability to control the Internet depends on its control of Internet Service Providers (ISPs), the private sector companies that grant Internet access to customers.
“ISPs have direct control of the Internet, so what happens in any country depends on the control that the state has over those ISPs,” Clark told Life’s Little Mysteries in an e-mail. “Some countries regulate the ISPs much more heavily. China has in the past ‘turned off’ the Internet in various regions.”
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