When you look at the internet from the protocol level, it seems borderless, but - as we saw during the Arab Spring - at the infrastructure level it really isn't

When you look at the internet from the protocol level, it seems borderless, but - as we saw during the Arab Spring - at the infrastructure level it really isn't. You have to get traffic into and out of a country somehow, and for the majority of users (excepting satellite and long range wireless) that means traffic flowing through a telco/ISP. That also means physical networks with physical peering points and traffic exchange contracts, all of which fall under local laws. For many smaller countries the number of 'border checkpoints' exactly equals the number of telcos/ISPs operating there. In the case of Egypt, all it took to shutdown ~100% of traffic[1] was a phonecall to the 4 biggest ISPs. Whether that shutdown was legal in Egypt or not is a matter of local law. Until there are international conventions governing traffic exchange, the internet is not borderless. [1] http://www.google.com/transparencyreport/traffic/?r=EG&l=EVERYTHING&csd=1294957800000&ced=1297377000000 http://www.google.com/transparencyreport/traffic/?r=EG&l...