Internet freedom meets strong-arm governments

Here's more on why Teapot Tommy Friedman is full of baloney when he talks about crowds of Tweeters in Cairo: It's easy, no, very easy in some cases, for an authoritarian government to shut down Internet access.

Start with this, re Egypt:

One of the government’s strongest levers is Telecom Egypt, a state-owned company that engineers say owns virtually all the country’s fiber-optic cables; other Internet service providers are forced to lease bandwidth on those cables in order to do business.

Or, hell, Friedman ... look at the U.S. If the Bush Administration was able to get AT&T to roll over so easily like a dead dog and put in that Internet splitter, even in a allegedly free country .... what else could be done here in the USofA under the name of "War on Terror"?

Back to Egypt. Some people could claim Mubarak's shutdown didn't work, but many cyberexperts, without passing political judgment, say rather it was that he waited too long.

But, what about the "decentralized" Internet? Not so fast:

Yet despite this decentralized design, the reality is that most traffic passes through vast centralized exchanges — potential choke points that allow many nations to monitor, filter or in dire cases completely stop the flow of Internet data

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What about Western media in Egypt?

If they were based on wired broadband, Egypt could cut them off, too, if it wanted, I'll venture. On wireless? If those networks were state-controlled, ditto. If on a satellite-type system, like a satellite cell phone, the government might be able to try jamming that.

Now, Egypt might not be able to pull that off. But China? Or our USofA?