Question 1

What is an internet shutdown, and how are they actually done?

Accepted Answer

A **deliberate disruption of internet access** by a government or an actor acting on its instruction, affecting a population, a region or a service. They have become more frequent, and the techniques are well documented.

**The methods, from blunt to precise:**

**Full national shutdown.** Ordering operators to stop routing — either by withdrawing BGP announcements, so the country's address space disappears from the global routing table, or by physically disconnecting international gateways. **Visible externally and immediately**, which is how researchers detect them.

**Regional shutdowns**, disabling mobile service in specific areas, which is the most common form and is frequently used around protests and examinations.

**Mobile-data-only shutdowns**, leaving voice and text working, which limits the political cost while achieving most of the effect since most access is mobile.

**Throttling**, degrading speed until video and images fail while text-based services technically work. **Deliberately deniable**, and harder to prove than a full shutdown.

**Service blocking**, targeting specific platforms by DNS, IP or protocol fingerprinting.

**Curfew shutdowns**, on a nightly schedule.

**How they are ordered.** Usually through legal powers over licensed operators, who face licence loss or criminal penalty for refusing. **Operators are rarely willing participants**, and several have published transparency reports recording the orders.

**When they happen:** elections, protests, conflict, communal violence, and — routinely in some countries — national examinations, to prevent cheating.

**The documented harms:**

**Economic cost**, estimated in billions annually, falling hardest on small businesses and informal workers who depend on mobile money.

**Safety**, where emergency services and ambulance calls fail.

**Concealment of abuses**, since shutdowns frequently coincide with events that would otherwise be recorded.

**Healthcare, banking and education** interruption.

**How they are detected:** routing data, active measurement platforms, traffic volume from large providers, and probe networks run by research organisations — which is why shutdowns can be independently verified rather than only reported.

Question 2

What is BGP, and why does it sometimes break the internet?

Accepted Answer

Border Gateway Protocol is how independent networks tell each other which addresses they can reach. It is the routing system the entire internet depends on — and it works largely on trust, which is

Question 3

What actually happens when a website goes down?

Accepted Answer

"Down" covers several quite different failures, and the error you see narrows it down considerably — which is worth knowing before assuming the site is at fault. DNS failure. The name cannot be

Question 4

How is internet filtering and censorship actually implemented?

Accepted Answer

Through several techniques operating at different layers, each with different costs, different accuracy and different ease of circumvention — and most real systems combine them. The techniques, in

Question 5

How accurate is IP geolocation?

Accepted Answer

Reliable at country level, decent at city level in dense areas, and frequently wrong at any finer resolution — because an IP address contains no location information at all. Everything is inference

Question 6

Who actually runs the internet?

Accepted Answer

Nobody, and several bodies with narrow remits — which is the accurate answer rather than an evasive one. There is no central authority; there are institutions that coordinate specific scarce

Question 7

What is net neutrality, and what does it actually require?

Accepted Answer

The principle that networks should carry all traffic equally, without favouring or discriminating between sources, destinations or applications on commercial grounds. What it prohibits, specifically:

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