OTOH, third world or dictatorships won’t blink when it comes to turning off an entire country - example is Tanzania in the recent election.. are there solutions for communication when international links are cut? A lan like solution scaled to cities or an entire country that is disconnected from the rest of the world?

I've been reading about the early history of the Internet.

The first ARPANET link to the United Kingdom required an exception to UK law. The traditional interpretation was that the state telecom monopoly (the General Post Office) had a monopoly on data transport. It was assumed that national governments have an absolute sovereign right to inspect data packets at the border, just like they do mail and parcels. That includes searches and seizures of foreign propaganda, material illegal under domestic law, etc.

> In early 1971 Larry proposed to break the circuit and connect in the NPL network to the ARPAnet. Unfortunately for that plan (but not for me), at this time the British government was trying to get the United Kingdom into the European Economic Community (EEC). The EEC governments, particularly France, were in any case suspicious of U.K. links with the United States. It was therefore politically impossible for NPL to be linked directly to a U.S. defense project. [1]

But the Internet was an experimental network. An exception could be made. Everyone would pretend that they were inside the United States legally speaking. This sort of worked when everyone was an academic restricted by network access policies of their institutions.

> I set up a Governing Committee, with the funding partners on it: Ann Letts represented the BPO, Donald Davies represented the NPL, and I was the Chair. Because of the questionable legality of what we were doing, all proposed users had to be approved individually. I put in security procedures so that all users had to log-in, with a password, on our relay.

[2]

This is related to the protocol wars of the 1980s. The X.25 protocol that was supported by all the established telecoms providers, included mechanisms for packet authority, automatic packet billing, and political boundary packet inspection mechanisms. [3]

X.25 was decried as too centralized, too complex, and too centred around the interests of the established telecoms. (Which it was.) TCP was better for both technical and political reasons. But the Protocol Wars were not a permanent victory. It was a wonderful moment in world history but the underlying tensions have resurfaced.

[1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/224386328_The_early...

[2] http://www0.cs.ucl.ac.uk/research/darpa/internet-history.htm...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Internet-OSI_Standard_War...

As Spain, Italy and now France are showing us though, states have no hesitancy to take the whole country offline to block just one piece of unwanted information.

The whole country of France went offline? When did that happen?

i missed this, can you point me in the right direction?

i want to read more

At this point, I worry about censorship of American Tech CEOs a lot more. Because it is both very real and deliberately destructive.

What are you talking about? When have Spain, Italy and France cut their Internet?

Except they're not taking the whole country offline. AFAIK even simple VPNs work without issue. Iran took the whole country offline, because their country barely functions, and still some people managed an external connection.