Iran and Libya each have a single point of control (1 AS), making complete national internet shutdown achievable with a single administrative action. Egypt's 2011 shutdown left one AS (Noor Group, 4.9% of connected IPs) operational for four days, apparently due to its role serving the Egyptian stock exchange and other core financial institutions.

Russia's high AS complexity (score 19.39, 2,346 ASes) enabled the Russian Business Network to hide malware-hosting ASes by chaining traffic through multiple intermediate legitimate-seeming ASes, making connections very difficult to trace and sever. The paper concludes that higher national AS complexity directly raises the operational cost of enumerating and cutting any given connection.

§IV, §VI defense

China has only 3 points of control covering approximately 240 million IP addresses (roughly 80 million IPs per point of control), the lowest ratio among large-population countries. This enabled China to cut off nearly all Internet access for the Xinjiang region for ten months beginning July 2009.

§II, §VI deployment

Eastern Asia averages 4.80 points of control and a complexity score of 1.54 across 510 million IP addresses, while Eastern Europe averages 19.10 PoC and a complexity score of 11.35 across 74 million IPs — nearly twice the complexity of any other region. Russia specifically has 2,346 autonomous systems and a complexity score of 19.39, versus China's 177 ASes and score of 0.11.

§II, Table II, Table III evaluation

By 2009, the top 150 autonomous systems carried approximately 50% of all Internet traffic globally, up from roughly 30% in 2007. Akamai alone claimed approximately 20% of all web traffic, and the proposed Level 3 / Global Crossing merger would have covered over half the world's IP addresses.

§I evaluation

Article 19 documents that Iran's National Information Network (NIN / SHOMA) was designed with explicit reference to China's Great Firewall as a model, with institutional mirroring: Iran's Supreme Council of Cyberspace parallels China's Cyberspace Administration of China, and both governments share a "cyber sovereignty" doctrine used to justify domestic content controls and cross-border technology transfer. The report frames Iran's filtering infrastructure as deliberately architected to replicate GFW capabilities, not as an independently developed system.

2026-article19-tightening-the-net §2, §3 dpisni-blockingdns-poisoningip-blockingbgp-hijackthrottling

On March 28, 2022, Russian ISP RTComm (AS8342) hijacked Twitter's IPv4 prefix 104.244.42.0/24 for approximately 45 minutes (12:05–12:50 UTC) and announced it to the global Internet as a blocking measure. The hijack was blunted because Twitter had preemptively registered RPKI route origin authorizations (ROAs) for its prefixes, causing RPKI-validating ASes worldwide to reject the hijacked route.

2023-ramesh-network §4.3 bgp-hijackasn-blackholing

Both Egypt and Libya demonstrate that concentration of Internet infrastructure under state ownership—in Egypt, all submarine fiber backhaul terminated at a single facility, the Ramses Exchange, controlled by the state telecommunications provider—makes country-wide BGP-based shutdowns technically straightforward. The authors conclude that the small number of state-controlled parties involved in international connectivity was the critical enabling factor, not any novel technical capability.

2011-dainotti-analysis §5.1.1 bgp-hijackasn-blackholing

Unsolicited background radiation traffic to the UCSD network telescope—particularly Conficker worm scanning (TCP SYN, port 445, 48-byte packets)—dropped nearly simultaneously with Egyptian BGP route withdrawals on January 27, corroborating control-plane analysis with data-plane evidence. Crucially, some worm-infected hosts continued to generate outbound scanning traffic even after their prefixes were BGP-withdrawn, because packet filtering was absent; this asymmetry between inbound unreachability and outbound connectivity can distinguish pure BGP-based blocking from combined BGP-plus-filtering approaches.

2011-dainotti-analysis §4.3, §5.1 bgp-hijackasn-blackholingmeasurement-platform

Egypt's Internet shutdown on January 27, 2011 was accomplished via BGP route withdrawals: approximately 2,500 IPv4 prefixes (out of 2,928 visible) disappeared within a 20-minute window beginning at 22:12:26 GMT, leaving only 176 prefixes visible by 23:30:00 GMT. The shutdown lasted more than five days, with BGP connectivity beginning to return at 09:29:31 GMT on February 2, and more than 2,500 Egyptian prefixes back in global BGP tables by 09:56:11 GMT.

2011-dainotti-analysis §5.1.1, §5.1.2 bgp-hijackasn-blackholing

During Egypt's 5.5-day Internet blackout, active CAIDA Ark measurements found that only 1% of probes to Egyptian IPv4 prefixes received responses, compared to 16–17% on normal days. The minority of addresses that retained bidirectional connectivity all mapped to BGP prefixes that had not been withdrawn—including prefixes serving the Egyptian stock exchange and two national banks, whose 83 prefixes were kept live until January 31 at 20:46:48 GMT before being simultaneously withdrawn.

2011-dainotti-analysis §5.1.2 bgp-hijackasn-blackholing