2011-02-22

Protests In Lybia Again Affecting The Internet

One regime after another is trying to silence the protests by disrupting the Internet. And big services keep on shivering as the .ly-domain is in danger.

The leader de facto of Libya, Muammar al-Gadda...Image via Wikipedia

While Gaddafi is still a friend of the western governments, nobody hesitates to use the .ly-domain for big things. And that's fine. It's the INTERnet, you know. But with the Libyan turmoil and the disrupting of the internet from the authorities, there is some fear about those domains. Some very important services like bit.ly are depending on those urls. Now, while it seems unlikely that these domains will get taken away from Tripoli, there is still some strange parallels to the turmoils in Egypt. Protests rising and the most important topic outside Libya is the oil as it seems. But for the people and the economy in Libya, it's once again a big problem when the internet gets partly shut down.

Can a modern country be defined by the unrestricted access to the Internet and by the limited amount of control from the government? Wait a second. The first point is surely one sign of a democratic level. But lets face the truth. Governments all over the world, which we call democratic, want more control over the Internet, and even the ability to shut everything down. And with blocking websites, kill-switch intentions and Hadopi, there is no unrestricted access left.

What we can see in Egypt and now in Libya, is that if you cut people ways of communication it's not getting better for you, but worse. So I hope all the politicians in the U.S. and Europe are watching carefully. A kill-switch for the Internet, might be a kill-switch for the country, too.