An attack on human rights in Egypt, where's your tubes now?

http://blogs.wsj.com/tech-europe/2011/01/28/how-egypt-cut-itself-off-from-the-net/

With major carriers such as Vodaphone colluding with the Egypt government to deny most access to the internet in Egypt, I'd really be afraid what'd stop this from happening just about anywhere else.

Surely with so many countries having ruled that internet is a human right, this shouldn't be possible in our civilized country.

As somebody who uses Vodaphone service(Which is crap), I'm really tempted to switch ISP. Because blocking a whole country like that is just inexcusable

How is cutting away internet access going to help anything?

If anything, it will send all the geeks, pirates, nerds and all those people, who wouldn't normally go to the streets, actually go out and protest.

Local businesses also gotta be suffering from it. All this for what? You can't contain information anyway, so the rationale for doing things like this, as seen to many times in the past, is invalid and does more damage than good.

According to the BBC they're cutting off the net by switching off the DNSs (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-12306041); in which case the answer to the question in the title ("where're your tubes now?") is 208.67.222.222.

7 hours ago, dahat wrote

You are missing a key factor in Egypt... they are sort of in a state of emergency right now, so it’s not unusual for any government to suspend certain rights for the duration of the emergency.

The country has effectively always been in a "state of emergency" ever since the late-1960s which is how a constitutional republic and a democracy can get away with trampling on the masses.

Incidentally, the president of Egypt just dismissed his cabinet, but plans to stay in power. It's a compromise, but is it enough to quell the masses?

(And I'll say I'm impressed with the progress these popular uprisings have had, I was expecting a repeat of the unsuccesful actions in Iran last year, where the government holds on to the policy/army/paramilitary and so doesn't go anywhere).

@dahat:

Ahh... sorry, I ought to know better than to trust the BBC on technical matters...