Here, in Spain, internet access is cut off for many websites during football matches because La Liga, the association football league, is in war against cloudflare for not blocking their allegedly offending websites. Or something like that.<p>Today, I tried to look up a word on a dictionary and I got an error message. “There must be a football game going on right now”. I thought
This should be an extremely high profile piece of news...<p>Imagine people all over planet Earth talking to each other in real life, in passing.. "Did you hear Internet access is cut off in ____"?<p>Is there not some "tracker" out there? I'm sure it would be hard to keep up to date but..
Apps should respond to events like this by becoming smaller--so that you can only collaborate with people on your network partition. Most of the time they instead break altogether.<p>The future is way to uncertain to assume a reliably connected future, which is what most of our tech is doing.
This is especially notable when you consider African states are bad at basically everything you'd expect a state to be able to do but are apparently very capable of this.
Some might say the other countries should stay out of it. For example people might say Switzerland should stay out of those nations issues. However, if Switzerland provided technology thought a normal market or not, to the rulers, they have already interfered with the natural progression of that nation. There is no hope of the people making the situation better while Switzerland is providing the rulers with tech and they're keeping it from the people.
Internet has become an essential right up there with housing, electricity, water etc.<p>Everywhere around the world people are connected to the internet. Even in poor African countries.
I blocked Africa from my networks a couple weeks ago, and the number of attempts in my logwatch emails has been cut in half ever since. Sometimes even more.
Internet shutdown typically happens during riots/ violent protests. Starlink makes "internet shutdown" impotent. Though Starlink has to follow country's laws and actually shutdown the internet. Most if not all protest are sponsored by entities that are against the host country and they will find ways to enable the internet for protesters with starlink or some other ways.