How Can a Country Disconnect Itself From the Internet?

20 February 2011

Anti-government protesters use internet on a laptop in Tahrir Square in Cairo, Egypt, Monday, February. 7, 2011

This is the VOA Special English Technology Report.

A five-day Internet shutdown in Egypt failed to stop the protests that forced President Hosni Mubarak to resign. But it raised a technical question. Just how were Egyptian officials able to shut down Internet service in their country?

Craig Labovitz is chief scientist at Arbor Networks, an Internet security company in the American state of Michigan. Mr. Labovitz says the Internet is not as indestructible as people might think. He says there are points where the flow of computer traffic can be restricted.

CRAIG LABOVITZ: "From a technical standpoint, the popular imagination of the Internet is as a network that can survive nuclear wars, can't be stopped, is everything, everywhere. But the engineering realities are a lot more prosaic. In many countries there are a few natural bottlenecks, whether it be large data centers or right-of-ways."

Mr. Labovitz says his researchers tracked the Internet shut down in Egypt as it was being carried out. He explains that in Egypt, Internet users connect to the outside world through a small number of providers with international links.

CRAIG LABOVITZ: "Although there are a hundred or more providers within the country -- domestic providers -- there really are only four providers that maintain external links to the external world. And there's an even a smaller number of data centers where the fiber optics cross Egypt. So you really just need to turn off a handful of machines to have this type of disruption."