Emily Kwong

Okay, so to talk more about the internet and the internet shutdown in Iran, I'm going to dig deeper with Amanda Meng, a social scientist at Georgia Tech who you heard from earlier, and Alberto Dainotti, a computer scientist also at Georgia Tech who studies internet infrastructure.

And Alberto, let's start from a technical standpoint.

What is the internet?

I know this is extremely complicated, but what exactly is a network?

Right, like a computer sends an email to another computer.

Those are endpoints.

Ah, yes.

It seems like magic, but it's all by design.

But given that the Internet, just as you're describing it, the infrastructure seems seemingly everywhere, and then with the wireless component and satellites involved, how do you even shut down something like that?

And in Iran, is the internet infrastructure fairly centralized?

Yeah.

And going back to you, Amanda, you and Alberto learned about the internet outages through your work together on IOTA, this research project.

Why is it important that something like IOTA exists?

Now, you measure internet connectivity using three main signals.

Can you describe each of those three signals and what they tell you about whether the Internet is flowing or not in a place?

Starting with the first signal, router announcements.

What are those?

And to be clear, Iran has shut down the Internet before, notably during protests in 2019.

There were also mass casualties.

This is known by some in Iran as Bloody November.