BILL QUICK ON INTERNET KILL SWITCHES:
I suspect that if the US government really wanted to pull the plug on the US net today, it could do so.
The whole notion of “internet revolutions” has always been a fragile one, and became even moreso when state actors began to understand and react to the threat.
He’s basically right — though on the other side, the economic cost of shutting down the Internet is enormous, even for Egypt, and would be gigantic in the United States. I had some thoughts on this subject in this review, for the Stanford Law & Policy Review, of Jack Goldsmith and Tim Wu’s Who Controls The Internet?