Censorship and Co-option of the Internet Infrastructure

Over a few short years, the Internet has grown to play an integral part of daily economic, social, and political life in most countries. From the Egyptian “Velvet Revolution” to the last US presidential campaign, Internet communication shapes public opinion and fosters social change. But despite its immense social importance, the Internet has proven remarkably susceptible to disruption and manipulation, including government induced multi-week outages (e.g. Libya and Egypt) and multi-year campaigns by autocratic regimes to render web sites and large address blocks unreachable. While parents, enterprises, and governments have always placed restrictions on end-user communication to meet social or legal goals we argue recent years have seen the beginning of a new trend—the co-option of the Internet infrastructure itself to affect large-scale censorship. In this paper, we use Internet routing, allocation, and backbone traffic statistics to explore several recent and ongoing infrastructure-based efforts to disrupt Internet communication. We focus our discussion on the risks of this infrastructure corruption trend to long-term evolution of the Internet.