I wonder if turning off the Internet will start to be treated as a reliable predictor that the government is going to fall. So far it's a pretty good one.
On the other hand, banning the media has worked well in the past, such as when China ordered the media out of Tiananmen before getting serious at the end. The problem is that nowadays with cellphones and twitter, banning the media accomplishes nothing because that merely deputizes the entire populace to become journalists. At Tiananmen no one could post to the internet from their cell phone. Things have changed since then. Now the only way to stop the media is to shut down the internet, cell phones, and land lines that might contact fax machines. But this leaves the autocrat with no reliable feedback about what is going on on the ground, while people manage to communicate news reports via satellite phone, ham radio, pigeons, across the border local wifi, and who knows what else.
A big question is what will governments do in response to this loss of control, something they can not stand? Something like the great firewall of china is one solution - leave the internet running but have the ability to monitor 100% of net traffic in real time and block prohibited communication instantly. In the US there is an approach of monitoring traffic for keywords (but no blocking) combined with psyops such as persona management and media control in order to get the sheep to go in the direction the herder wants them to go.
If the Tiananmen protestors had waited until this moment in 2011 to protest, then you would have seen the fall of China. As it is, I suspect that the Chinese government was forced to wise up about controlling an Internet-connected populace.
As for psy-ops and media control, that's been going on since the late 19th century, and was down to a science by the early 20th.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6718420906413643126#
They don't want to govern, they just want to rule. And Monarchies still rule in most of the first world.
However, the Japanese Emperor has no 'reserve' powers. So its ability to take power may be more restricted, however there's always a good chance that they would be restored to power in the event of an uprising.
Whatever the case, we live in interesting times.