Hosni Mubarak feels the double edged sword of the Internet in Egypt

Any repressive regime is damned if they have the internet, and damned if they don't...

Egypt cuts off the Internet Service Provider Noor during the Revolution...too late...

"So why did Hosni Mubarak give up on the government’s total information blackout? The answer should be a lesson for other Internet-unfriendly regimes: 


In any modern country, argues Lucie Morillon, the head of the Internet desk for Reporters Without Borders, (RSF) keeping millions of people offline simply isn’t a sustainable approach to quelling dissent. “There are very few countries in the worlds that can be cut off from the world’s economy for this long,” she says.


...Ultimately Egypt faces the same problem as any repressive regime in the digital era, one that University of Maryland Sociology professor Zeynep Tufekci calls the “Dictator’s Dilemma.” 


As she summarizes it, 'If they allow Internet to spread within the country, it poses a threat to their regime. If they don’t, they are cut off from the world–economically and socially.'"


From Forbes magazine blog, read on.