Vodafone suspends service in Egypt in an attempt to shutdown the protests| Dreams of a Typewriter

World’s largest mobile telecom service crumbles in front of a regime that seems to have no support from its own people or government machinery, despite the fact that Vodafone Egypt accounts for about 0.4% of the Vodafone's worldwide revenue. Why so fast, is all we ask?

As the Egypt Protests enter their fourth day (if you don’t know about it, first read this), Vodafone Egypt announced its intention to comply with Egyptian authorities who demanded its suspension of service. Along with the two other internet providers, Vodafone’s suspension of service has virtually cutoff the country from the rest of the world. According to BBC technology correspondent Mark Gregory, "[V]irtually the entire internet infrastructure of an electronically sophisticated nation has been switched off… This is believed to be the first time a government has engineered an almost complete shutdown of electronic communications to deal with political dissent.”

According to reports, Vodafone has shutdown Twitter and later Facebook since January 25, the day the protests began. Over the last week, Twitter and Facebook had been very influential in organizing the protests and while their suspension hasn’t stopped the protests, it must have slowed the protesters down.

The compliance of telecom giant brought back one of the critical questions: how much can we trust the corporations that seem to know and influence our lives more than our mothers? After all, Egypt is not profitable enough market for Vodafone for the company to suck up to the government. It accounts for about 0.4% of companies total revenue worldwide (took me more than an hour to fish this data out). In fact, last year, Vodafone was looking to sell off it’s controlling stake in Vodafone Egypt to the Egyptian Government because it found the market too competitive. The sale did not go through because the parties couldn’t agree on a number.

And yet, it was eager to comply with the regime’s orders to shut down its operations. Now everyone appreciates that Vodafone is a business and like all businesses it is out there to simply make profit. But there was absolutely no need to comply almost instantly with the Egyptian Government’s extra-legal demands. After all, there is something like responsibility to one’s consumers (24 million of angry Egyptians). One can understand that with even bastions of democracy like US not coming out in open to support of the protests, a corporation like Vodafone may be biased in favor of sticking with the government. But instant accession to the government’s demand suggests a somewhat corrupt outlook of the company.

As one of my friends, who regularly does business with African governments, explained to me, “Governments, especially dictatorships, would always want to make you dance to their tunes instantly. But there are bureaucratic loopholes, politics, coercion or simply standoffs to delay such decisions. After all, to protect their profits, companies go to extreme lengths against African dictators all the time. Until their men are not pointing a gun to your head, there is no need to cave in immediately.”

“The reason Vodafone acceded so quickly may be because of some skeleton with which it could have been threatened by the government.”