Epitaphs for the Mubarak government all note that the mobilizing power of the Internet was one of the Egyptian opposition’s most potent weapons. But quickly lost in the swirl of revolution was the government’s ferocious counterattack, a dark achievement that many had thought impossible in the age of global connectedness. In a span of minutes just after midnight on Jan. 28, a technologically advanced, densely wired country with more than 20 million people online was essentially severed from the global Internet.

Egypt has apparently done what many technologists thought was unthinkable for any country with a major Internet economy: It unplugged itself entirely from the Internet to try and silence dissent. Experts say it's unlikely that what's happened in Egypt could happen in the United States because the U.S. has numerous Internet providers and ways of connecting to the Internet. Coordinating a simultaneous shutdown would be a massive undertaking.

Cyberspace will soon come under much greater legal control, according to one expert - who forecasts that denial of service attacks will eventually be ordered by courts of law against offenders.

Timothy Thomas lists 18 ways in which terrorists can use internet technologies to further their goals and grow their organization. He concludes that this 'cyberplanning' is "as important a concept as cyberterrorism, and perhaps even more so."

Katie Hafner examines the ways in which the internet is decentralized and distributed, relying on "the cooperation and mutual interests of the telecommunications companies." She examines the prospects of a future need for government control.

For much of its life, the Internet has been seen as a great democratizing force, a place where nobody needs know who or where you are. But that notion has begun to shift in recent months, as governments and private businesses increasingly try to draw boundaries around what used to be a borderless Internet to deal with legal, commercial and terrorism concerns.