Blocking Internet Cost Egypt at Least $90M, Says OECD
The Egyptian government's five-day block of Internet services cost the national economy at least US$90 million, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) said Thursday. — The Paris-based organization …
Context & Ripple Effects
The outage was first tracked as Egypt dropping off the internet, with reporting examining how a small number of telephone calls may have enabled the disruption and why one ISP remained connected. The OECD’s estimate turns a network-control episode into a quantified economic consequence for Egypt.
First-order effects
- The OECD places a minimum US$90 million economic cost on the five-day interruption, giving Egyptian authorities and affected businesses a concrete measure of the disruption’s immediate commercial damage.
Second-order effects
- The estimate raises the cost of treating national connectivity as a purely security or political lever: service providers’ continuity arrangements become relevant to the economic exposure of a shutdown.
Third-order effects
- If governments and multilateral bodies continue to quantify outage losses, internet access becomes an economic-policy dependency whose interruption carries a more visible fiscal and business cost.
The trend: Internet shutdowns are becoming measurable economic events, not only communications controls, as network dependence spreads through national commerce.