Governments and corporations have more control over the Internet than ever.
Now,
digital activists want to build an alternative network
that can never be blocked,
filtered
or shut down.
Just after midnight on January 28, 2011,
the government of Egypt,
rocked by three straight days of massive antiregime protests organized in part through Facebook and other online social networks,
did something unprecedented in the history of 21st-century telecommunications :
it turned off the Internet.
Exactly how it did this remains unclear,
but the evidence suggests that five well-placed phone calls
— one to each of the country’s biggest Internet service providers (ISPs)
— may have been all it took.
.