No business, no boozing, no casual sex: when Togo turned off the internet
September 28, 2017 9:39 AM   Subscribe

The government could have been smarter. The best way to divert our youth from politics would have been to give them free, unlimited internet access a few days before the protests, and drop the price of beer and condoms – all the while playing “Be safe, live long” songs on the radios. The youngies would have been watching porn, WhatsApping and YouTubing, and would have been too distracted to think about politics.
posted by infini (18 comments total) 9 users marked this as a favorite
 
I was saving up my 500th post for something, I guess this is it since I forgot all about it and just came here with the link
posted by infini at 9:40 AM on September 28, 2017 [6 favorites]


Couldn't decide if the writer was taking a piss or not.
posted by Barry B. Palindromer at 11:32 AM on September 28, 2017


This honestly reads like a plotline from a YA Dystopian novel. "And then out of desperation, the Authority shut down the internet..." It just needs a woman with a special ability and two potential boyfriends in the center of it all.
posted by happyroach at 11:56 AM on September 28, 2017 [13 favorites]


I wonder how this would have played out if it were longer than a week, and if it weren't in the midst of a political crisis. On an individual level, unplugging has helped me a lot (yes, I realize the hypocrisy of typing this now). On a societal level, would things get better or worse overall? I feel like the Internet has democratized a lot of things and allowed marginalized people to find each other. For example, growing up queer in a small town is a vastly different experience with the Internet than without it. The 1963 March on Washington was of course organized without the Internet, as were all protests until the 90s, but the general population's awareness of them was mediated through newspapers and TV. Now I can tune into a livestream of a Berkeley action and see for myself that the neo-Nazi attacked the antifa first.

My guess is that the youth of Togo went right back to Whatsapp as soon as the switch was flipped back on.
posted by AFABulous at 12:17 PM on September 28, 2017 [1 favorite]


Cameroon's outage was even more selective, and lasted much longer. This from an article written back in February 2017

According to our estimates, in the last 15 days, the Internet shutdown in Anglophone regions of Cameroon already cost 723,000 dollars, or 675,000 euros, or 443,000,000 CFA francs.

posted by infini at 12:28 PM on September 28, 2017 [2 favorites]


Google’s newest Code-In champion, Nji Collins Gbah, a young 17-year old computer expert from Cameroon, is the first contest winner from an African nation, and will be going to Google’s Mountain View headquarters to further hone his skills. But in the meantime, he has had to struggle with a lack of internet access at home, which went down the day after Google’s Code-In 2016 contest ended.

Local techies say that he has had to travel around the country just to submit applications to Google since then. And this is not because of a brownout or device failure – Collins already overcame those challenges during the competition – but because of an act of censorship that’s becoming all too common in the world. Collins, like millions of other Cameroonians living in the country’s English-speaking regions, has not had regular web access for over a month, because the government has imposed an internet blackout affecting some 5 million people, in an act of collective punishment to force an end to civil unrest.

Among the millions impacted by the blackout is the country’s small but growing start-up community, concentrated in the city of Buea in Cameroon’s South West Region, Geektime spoke with long-time resident and entrepreneur Kenneth Ngah, to get a better understanding of the impact on Buea, dubbed the “Silicon Mountain” of innovation in the region.

posted by infini at 12:30 PM on September 28, 2017 [2 favorites]


Would it be technically possible to shut off the internet in a large country like the US? I certainly wouldn't put it past the current administration. Imagine Twitter finally banned Trump. I'm positive he'd happily flip a big switch to turn off the Internet as retribution.
posted by AFABulous at 1:18 PM on September 28, 2017 [1 favorite]


Would it be technically possible to shut off the internet in a large country like the US?

This depends in large part on how you define "the Internet". You could shut down what someone whose usage of the Internet is primarily casual infotainment would consider "the Internet", probably by screwing around with DNS; there's a significant centralization of control there at the root zone level, controlled by IANA. (Although I am not at all convinced that the people who actually control things would necessarily obey an order from the Executive Branch to shut it down, and the way things are structured would give them some pretty decent legal cover to at least foot-drag for the time necessary to implement an alternate root server. The Chinese government would be just deee-lighted to step in and provide the world an alternative to IANA in this eventuality, I'm sure.) What you'd end up with is fragmentation of the DNS namespace, probably—a "split root". Nobody really wants this, TBH.

More likely, you could pressure the entities (US corporations) that control the big TLDs like ".com" to selectively censor certain domains via insertion of bad DNS records. This is a common tactic in other countries, and occasionally applied in the US via court orders (mostly, to my knowledge, as the result of trademark disputes before the domain registrars themselves implemented a process very favorable to trademark holders; occasionally by the FBI as a criminal-law enforcement action). IIRC VeriSign controls a bunch of big TLDs and I think they'd be pretty vulnerable to pressure. But that wouldn't "shut down the Internet"; it would just mean that certain sites would need to find other domain names, perhaps in friendlier namespaces (much like The Pirate Bay does weekly).

At any rate, even if you fudged with DNS—which is the easiest lever to pull, and thus the one that gets pulled all the time by governments—the actual IP network is still there. That's much harder to shut down, because (1) a lot of other stuff relies on it, and (2) it's a reasonably decentralized thing without a single place or entity you can threaten. The Internet was, and still is, a series of interconnected but autonomous networks, and those networks (if their operators aren't lazy or cheap) can typically function in isolation or in spite of link failures. Some of those networks might be hard to shut down, particularly if the people running them didn't want them to be.
posted by Kadin2048 at 3:15 PM on September 28, 2017 [3 favorites]


The Internet was, and still is, a series of interconnected but autonomous networks, and those networks (if their operators aren't lazy or cheap) can typically function in isolation or in spite of link failures.

After all, that's literally what it was originally designed for.
posted by Pope Guilty at 5:08 PM on September 28, 2017 [1 favorite]


I mean, yes, the US government could, by hook or by crook, shut down Internet access in most of the US, but they'd cripple the economy. A vast number of businesses have moved to VPNs over the Internet instead of private lines to interconnect branch offices and partners. The Internet enables millions to work from home.

Even just shutting down cell data would have much the same effect, just at a smaller scale.

So if the question is would they, my answer is not unless they are a lot stupider than they have proven themselves to be. Could they? Absolutely. There are a lot of them, but there are a limited number of known international gateways. And there are a very limited number of consumer ISPs that provide service to 80%+ of the US population if they wanted to go that route.
posted by wierdo at 5:10 PM on September 28, 2017


So if the question is would they, my answer is not unless they are a lot stupider than they have proven themselves to be.

have you seen a Trump press conference?
posted by AFABulous at 5:32 PM on September 28, 2017 [2 favorites]


Trump could start a nuclear war more easily than he could shut down the Internet.

Seriously: the US military establishment has a set procedure for bringing about The End of All Things (or The End of Someone Else's Things; these days we're flexible). And there is a legal, bureaucratic, and technical / operational framework for validating, communicating and executing that plan, given the order to do so. Nobody knows exactly how that would go and if someone would say "nope" if they thought the order was crazy or illegal, but... the skids are greased.

In contrast, there's no groundwork laid for shutting down the Internet. It wouldn't be quick or easy. Maybe you could disconnect the big international cables, or arm-twist consumer ISPs into shutting down or blocking their gateways, but what you'd do is fracture the network, probably not destroy it. And it might well trigger mass protests, just like in Togo. By the time you'd be done with the task, you'd have broken telephony, 911 systems, the power grid, huge sections of industrial supply chains, remote offices, security systems... there'd be a lot of angry people with nothing better to do than protest.

I think a more likely scenario is a country deciding to block or blackhole connections (outbound or inbound) from another country in particular as part of a trade war or other economic punishment. That's probably doable, not that a determined person wouldn't easily get around it.
posted by Kadin2048 at 10:18 PM on September 28, 2017 [3 favorites]


Would it be technically possible to shut off the internet in a large country like the US?

I think so, yes. Not 100%, but 99%. The obvious large country to consider is China, which shuts off parts of the Internet regularly and persistently. But they designed their network for that, the US didn't.

In the US there are only a few primary carriers for long haul networking. Invent some legal pretext that forces them to turn off those wires and the Internet mostly stops working, at least for several days. It becomes a legal matter, not a technical one. Either that or have NSA use one of its very large stock of zero day exploits to just take down the Internet routing infrastructure. Or the DNS infrastructure. Or all of Amazon Web Services, which will gut ~75% of consumer websites.

Nerds like me would fight back. It's hard to shut down wireless links and with time we could jury-rig replacements for essential services. But that's like saying you can't shut down dissident publications because you can't stop samizdat. I mean sure, that's true, but there's a huge difference between underground press and public newspapers.

Free speech is incredibly fragile.
posted by Nelson at 12:23 AM on September 29, 2017 [1 favorite]


In contrast, there's no groundwork laid for shutting down the Internet. It wouldn't be quick or easy

As Nelson points out, the high capacity, long haul network infrastructure is highly concentrated, so from a purely technical standpoint you can fracture the network relatively easily.

But that is not, I think, the main vulnerability. I think the main vulnerability is that for a large number of people, I would say a huge majority, "the internet" stops working when Google and Facebook stop working. It's not meaningful that the network can technically survive Armageddon when the societal potential or usefulness of the network is contingent on distributions of power that mirror and co-opt the status quo.

I don't know if that's necessarily a bad thing or whether it even can be prevented. But it is just another one of very many reasons to try and make sure the status quo is not unutterably awful.
posted by dmh at 3:56 AM on September 29, 2017 [1 favorite]


for a large number of people, I would say a huge majority, "the internet" stops working when Google and Facebook stop working

All of us know people who get to facebook.com by typing FACEBOOK into Google.
posted by flabdablet at 6:32 AM on September 29, 2017 [3 favorites]


I'm sorry but I absolutely hate the way this was written. It comes off as one big grumble about "the youth these days". It out with the fact that young people are using the internet to organize and talk about revolution or a coup. And instead of talking about history or political unrest or anything substantial, they spend the next few paragraphs pining for the good old days, talking about how everyone is just mindless slaves to the internet. It even goes so far to say that people with unlimited internet wouldn't do anything other than be on their phone, fuck, and drink. Even though the entire damn basis for the article is that young people were using it as a political tool against the government! I just.. it's all over the place and seems kind of condescending, honestly. "So the local lexicon had to be enriched with this new word, “the internet"..."
posted by FirstMateKate at 9:27 AM on September 29, 2017 [1 favorite]


seems kind of condescending, honestly. "So the local lexicon had to be enriched with this new word, “the internet"..."

Without debating the rest of your observations, I'd just like to highlight regarding this - we don't see it as condescending, if we're looking at the spread of connectivity via the mobile platform - I have a dual SIM Nokia brand new for $30 that lets me browse the web on the cheap with MS Opera. FB has its own icon.

And, on the other side of the world, research discovered folks thought FB was the internet, and vice versa. Here.

So this just follows the pattern of adoption once you start diving deeper into the demographic diversity.
posted by infini at 9:32 AM on September 29, 2017


Turning off the Internet in America looks different because so many much of it is hosted internally. Blocking access to singular global Internet would be terrible but how much of America wouldn't even notice, so long as YouPorn, YouTube and Netflix still worked?

To turn off the Internet in America would only require disabling international links, and a well placed group could probably do that over the Internet itself. (Hijack BGP to disable all external traffic.) That wouldn't prevent people from seeing Facebook, and the news would spread fast, but once that happens, there's no longer a capital-I Internet, but a country-sized LAN. (The fact China has effectively put such controls in place domestically doesn't escape me.)

Preventing US residents from accessing US-hosted sites is a different (though quite interesting) question, but there are planets, but only one Earth - the Internet is the same way. If you're on a limited subdivision, even if that partition includes Google and Facebook, you're not on the Internet.
posted by fragmede at 2:49 PM on September 29, 2017


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