How hard is it, exactly, to kill the Internet? Egypt seems to have been able to do it. But Egypt's situation isn't exactly the same as that in the Western world. And even though Egypt only has four big ISPs, the fact that everything went down after midnight local time suggests that it took considerable effort to accomplish the 'Net shut-off. After all, it seems unlikely that President Hosni Mubarak ordered the Internet to be shut down as he went to bed; such a decision must have been made earlier in the day, and then taken hours to execute.
Also, the fact that such a drastic measure was deemed necessary may indicate that more targeted measures, such as blocking Twitter, didn't get the job done. This nuclear option—see below—was intended to make online coordination of anti-government action impossible; at the same time, the mushroom cloud may give protesters hope that their efforts are not in vain. As one blogger writes: "It's as if the regime has done the information aggregation for you and packaged it into a nice fat public signal."
Cables and routing
But back to the "how," and "would this also work in a Western democracy?"
The easiest way to disconnect a country from the Internet is to cut the cables that leave the country. Egypt has a bunch of sea cables that go across the Mediterranean to Italy, and a few others that visit other Mediterranean destinations. Other cables run through the Red Sea towards east Africa and in the direction of India and beyond.
I haven't seen any maps with cables that cross the border toward neighboring countries—it's much easier to pull fiber through the sea than through the desert. Interestingly, it doesn't look like the connections that run through Egypt have been affected. This traffic typically traverses the country without ever leaving the fiber, so it remains oblivious to the turmoil going on in Egypt. The fact that traffic between Europe and Asia is unaffected means the fiber optic cables themselves weren't cut.
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