Egypt's Stone Age Response To 21st Century Media

"The United States, by contrast, has thousands of Internet routes and providers... a central shutdown here is unthinkable, if not impossible. "

I'm not sure how the situation in the US compares to Canada, but certainly here there is the _appearance_ of hundreds of providers, but the reality is that the vast majority are just resellers for Bell, Telus, and Rogers, with a handful of independents like Cogeco and Shaw on the side. I would guess that you could cut off the internet to 99.9% of Canadian residents with about seven or eight phone calls.

How similar is the situation in the US? Of these "thousands" of ISPs serving residential and business needs, how many are truly peered outside of a single parent or partner?

Article fails to mention that the U.S. is actively considering internet "kill-switch" authority.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-31921_3-20029282-281.html

A civilised response it to have a state owned media who if they forget who their masters are you can have a quiet word with.

Then you arrest any citisen journalist who happens to photograph demonstrators viscously hitting their heads against police batons and threaten then with 15years in prison for wiretapping or for taking images useful to terrorists.

Does the US really have that many ISPs? In most cities I've lived in you have two choices, Verizon or Comcast. Other smaller niche ISPs usually lease lines owned by one of those two anyway. When you consider who owns the backbones etc, I don't think it would be that hard to shut most people off of the Internet in the USA with a few calls either.

I fear what a 21st Century response might entail.

A first world country like America isn't going to kill the internet, it is just going to systematically disallow unauthorized content.

What we need to worry about is not a kill switch but a "packet shaping switch", which turns off all non-essential government functions.

And the solution to this is encryption and blurring the line between "essential government internet function" and "evil citizen communication device".

What is needed here is a communication device as difficult to block as human speech. How hard would it be to just plug in a wireless card into a ham radio so packet data is sent over the ham radio waves?