That's the situation that Togo found itself in recently. The government of Togo, which has been experiencing some resistance to their country's heavy-handed rule from the entrenched family, shut down the Internet.
The results were NOT what might be expected.
I understand their gov shutting down the Inet as a possible method to delay or avoid being overthrown. But governments have been toppled for centuries without the internet. Or is there some nuance in the story that I'm not seeing ?
ReplyDeleteI found two things of interest.
ReplyDeleteI read a lot of the article and skimmed some so maybe I missed something but the title and the tone of it would have one believing it was presenting fact. It is a fact that the internet was cut. It is a fact that a lot of businesses that depended on the net were greatly impacted. However, the article expressed some other things as "fact" that I didn't see substantiated. "No boozing", "No casual sex", "More families talking", "More book reading". As near as I can tell, that was all supposition not validated fact.
Secondly, this didn't surprise me but I did notice that the Guardian thought the biggest threat to business was that a dictatorship could just shut down the internet, "Companies that had moved their core business applications into the cloud could neither access their tools nor retrieve their data. Virtual business, it turned out, might not be suitable for dictatorship-prone countries." 1) Any of the governments of the world will do it if they feel threatened. and 2) the bigger threat isn't so much blocking the data but manipulating the data. I make no accusations but this is being done to business and general public daily by so many entities (including governments) that I see this as a much larger problem.