Here is the US, I'd like to see a lobby to have Communications Act amended to remove any power of the government or business to shut down communications networks, systems or inter-connections.
This idea that governments can protect us from ourselves is foolish.
The Myanmar military’s coup, and the killing of hundreds of protesters, were already illegal.
If the US joint chiefs of staff arrested the president and congress, the CEO of T-mobile would not refuse to switch off mobile networks if half a dozen marines with loaded ARs showed up at his house with an order to do so.
If people with guns threatened me and the way out was to turn off a network, I think I’d do as they ‘asked’.
Do you really mean to propose that network operators not be able to disconnect from people that don't pay or are disruptive to their operations? I feel like you need to be a little more clear about what responsibilities you think private entities have.
What seems to work best is when the government and the people like each other, and nobody's afraid. That doesn't mean that they have to agree, but it does mean that they disagree politely, and seek to resolve disagreements with compromises that everybody can live with.
That requires a certain amount of trust and good faith. Once there's widespread fear, it's not going to end well for anybody.
Is shutting down internet a small step towards a coup, as opposed to being the fruit of one? In the case of the US, i don't think it's likely short or medium term.
What about police abusing this power? That's a local government problem, not a national one, so it's different to what's going on in myanmar.
It gets as bad as it has in Myanmar when one doesn't have those laws. If you ban cutting communications, it normalizes the expectation. Cutting communications now becomes personally and politically risky in a way it isn't if it's in the grey area.
For an example, see India's slow slide into authoritarianism in this respect. Cutting communications in Kashmir was legal, but iffy. That normalized, legally and culturally, the mechanism. Now, communications are routinely cut across the country.
All that said, Myanmar fell to a military coup. That's a different failure mechanism from elected leaders getting too comfortable on their thrones.
Yes. The lesson is that when your country is taken over by a military coup, and guys with assault rifles come to shut down the internet, pre-existing laws and rhetoric about free speech and open access and all that other good stuff become completely irrelevant.
You are looking at a wet street, and are claiming that it caused rain.
If you actually want to prevent this from happening here, the step that you should worry about is the coup and the killings, not the internet getting shut down in the following week.
Goes both ways.