If you aren’t in the loop on what’s going on in Egypt, let me give you a brief summary to give the rest of this article some context. On the 25th, people took to the streets to protest the growing rate of poverty and unemployment in the country, as well as the autocratic governance by President Hosni Mubarak for the last thirty years. These have been reported to be the largest protests that have been seen in Egypt since the 1970s.
These protests primarily started after those in Tunisia forced their government to be overthrown and the autocratic ruler there to flee to Saudi Arabia. Yemen has also followed suit in a series of similar but smaller protests following those in Egypt and Tunisia.
The Egyptian government first responded to these protests by having Internet service providers (ISPs) block people from accessing Twitter and Facebook, both of which have been used in past protests in other countries. Over the course of the next few days, things got a lot worse. Egypt completely shut off the Internet.
Shutting off the Internet for an entire country really isn’t an easy task; there isn’t a single giant red button housed inside a Plexiglas case that someone can just press to block people from accessing the Internet. No, it’s much more complicated than that.
The Internet is composed of many domain name system (DNS) servers placed around the world. Computers use these servers to convert domain names, like Google.com, into Internet Protocol (IP) addresses that all computers have, similar to the way your cellphone can call a number based on the name you choose to call in your contact list. ISPs in Egypt were initially ordered by the government to shut down their own DNS servers so none of these name-to-address conversions could occur. Fortunately, the Internet is composed of many DNS servers that are open to the public to use, so many journalists stationed in Egypt, as well as other tech-savvy users, configured their computers to use the servers instead of the ones in the country in order to communicate with the rest of the world.
This wasn’t enough for the Egyptian government, so they took the final step and had ISPs in the country clear the routing tables on their externally facing routers. Think of a routing table as the address/postal code system in Canada. If Canada eliminated it, mail wouldn’t be forwarded to the correct locations in the country, making mail “unroutable.” The same thing happened with people trying to access websites based within Egypt, as well as those based outside for those trying to access the Internet from within the country; there was nowhere for Internet traffic to be routed.
For the time being, most people in the country cannot access the Internet. There is still one alternative: using dial-up like back in the ‘90s. Some European-based ISPs have opened up free dial-up accounts for people in Egypt so that they can communicate with others (phone networks are still up). The most extreme step for the Egyptian government to take next would be to take down the phone networks, but then there would be absolutely no way for anyone, the government most likely being included as well, to communicate over long distances within the country.
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