In which I explain to you why you must be for net neutrality.

Egypt is missing. The entire country dropped off the Internet today (and the cell network as well), moments after AP video footage of a protester being shot in the head began to emerge. It looks like there’s one network left, Noor, and currently the assumption is that it was allowed to stay connected to the rest of the world only because it carries the country’s stock exchange traffic. That’s one pipe out of 80 massive, country-feeding connections:

At 22:34 UTC (00:34am local time), Renesys observed the virtually simultaneous withdrawal of all routes to Egyptian networks in the Internet’s global routing table. Approximately 3,500 individual BGP [border gateway protocol] routes were withdrawn, leaving no valid paths by which the rest of the world could continue to exchange Internet traffic with Egypt’s service providers. Virtually all of Egypt’s Internet addresses are now unreachable, worldwide.

The Internet was designed to be self-healing. It was built to carry data even after entire cities had been destroyed. If you understood even a little of how core routers work, you’d love the Internet eleven times more than you already do, and you would know how utterly fucked up it is that an ENTIRE COUNTRY has gone dark. 80,000,000 voices have been silenced.

This. Is. Unacceptable. The Internet is not just full of porn, astronomically incorrect chain emails about the visibility of Mars, and captioned pictures of pet cats: it’s the fastest, truest, best form of community the world has ever known. If something terrible happens and someone is somehow able to get it online, people will rally. It brings us stories of human trafficing, genocide, starvation… and we respond, five dollars at a time. And even if we can’t fix it, commiserating is the essence of being human. It balances the load. It’s meaningful simply to know, to weep for the suffering of your fellow human beings.

This is a graph of what happened to Egyptian packet flow:

No government should have the right – or the ability – to silence that many voices. Not in this, the year of our Lord 2011. We can’t go back. Time is an arrow, and it goes in one direction only.

• Egypt Leaves the Internet
• What’s Happening in Egypt Explained. (UPDATED)
• Locations/types of surviving data traffic
• Should Obama Control the Internet?
• MetaFilter thread on Egypt’s net shutdown
• #Egypt hashtag on Twitter (some people on the ground there are getting tweets out)

Americans! If you want to protect yourself from your own government disconnecting you from the rest of the world, you will vehemently oppose with the peaceful tools of your democratic nation the Cybersecurity Act of 2009:

It gives the president the ability to “declare a cybersecurity emergency” and shut down or limit Internet traffic in any “critical” information network “in the interest of national security.” The bill does not define a critical information network or a cybersecurity emergency. That definition would be left to the president.

The bill does not only add to the power of the president. It also grants the Secretary of Commerce “access to all relevant data concerning [critical] networks without regard to any provision of law, regulation, rule, or policy restricting such access.”

And in order for this legislation to work, the government would have to change the very structure of the Internet in order to make it centralized enough to be shut-down-able. A new Ma Bell! Voila: easily monitorable, controllable information. Emergencies, my arse. Who are we kidding that any elected official would possess the strength of character not to dip a finger in?

If you’re a luddite and you don’t understand the power of the Internet, I’ll paint it like this: Imagine your government just closed all the borders so you can’t get out, seized all the telephone companies (both land and cell) so that you can’t call out, dismantled the press so you can’t write out, and halted the mails so you can’t send out, and then started shooting: that’s what happened in Egypt today.

I don’t give a shit about the politics in the region. What I am opposed to is the silencing of voices. Atrocity happens most easily in secret. All human suffering is abominable. You know this because it’s true.

There, but for the grace of God, go I.

80,000,000 souls.

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If you want to help those in Iran, Tunisia, Egypt, China, or other countries who are facing online censorship, set up a Tor relay (or bridge) and share your bandwidth: Help Egypt – Join the Cloud.

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• WE WILL NOT BE SILENCED
• How Do You Shut Down the Internet in a Whole Country?

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But don’t take my word for it: here’s Boing Boing, saying the very same thing.

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Funny, I think, how disconnecting Egypt from the Internet has gotten this revolution several orders of magnitude more attention than it probably would have garnered otherwise.

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This post was (briefly) the number one result for the Google search “net neutrality Egypt.” Squee!

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UPDATE: The last network connection to the outside world, Noor, went down today (01/31/11). Egypt has been removed entirely from the Internet. ENTIRELY. The country is losing millions each day.
UPDATE: Egypt is back online as of about ten hours ago.