The Internet shutdown in Syria likely took very little to accomplish considering the country's limited Internet infrastructure and international connectivity, network analysts said Friday.
Such a move would be much harder, if not impossible, to achieve at least from a technology standpoint, in the U.S. or other democracies with mature Internet infrastructures, they said.
Syria on Thursday suddenly dropped off the Internet, as the result of what many believe was the government's decision to pull the plug on Internet connectivity.
Internet monitoring companies, including Renesys, Arbor Networks and CloudFlare on Thursday reported seeing the drop off around 6 a.m. ET when all 84 of Syria's IP address blocks suddenly became unavailable. All Internet traffic between Syria and the rest of the world stop flowing within a period of five minutes.
Since then, the country has remained off the grid, prompting CloudFlare to describe the situation as a "more complete blackout" than any witnessed in other countries in the region over the past two years."In Syria you have a situation where there is one incumbent Internet service provider," Zmijewski said. All Internet communications go through the state-run Syrian Telecommunications Establishment (STE), which has total control over them.
All it would have taken for the Syrian government to shut down the entire country's Internet was a single call to STE, he said. STE could have simply switched off the routers handling international traffic so they would stop announcing routes to the global Internet, Zmijewski said.
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9234199/Why_what_happened_to_the_Internet_in_Syria_couldn_t_happen_here
