Internet backbone

In addition, the high degree of redundancy of today's network links and sophisticated real-time routing protocols provide alternate paths of communications for load balancing and congestion avoidance.

[citation needed] The real-time routing protocols and redundancy built into the backbone is also able to reroute traffic in case of a failure.

[1][9] Antitrust authorities have acted to ensure that no provider grows large enough to dominate the backbone market.

In the United States, the Federal Communications Commission has decided not to monitor the competitive aspects of the Internet backbone interconnection relationships as long as the market continues to function well.

[1][9] During the 2011 Egyptian revolution, the government of Egypt shut down the four major ISPs on January 27, 2011 at approximately 5:20 p.m. EST.

Instead, the government shut down the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) sessions announcing local routes.

The ISP Noor Group provided connectivity only to Egypt's stock exchange as well as some government ministries.

Connecting companies directly to the backbone will provide enterprises faster Internet service which meets a large market demand.

In 2011, a 70-year-old woman in Georgia pierced a fiber backbone line with a shovel and left the neighboring country of Armenia without Internet access for 12 hours.

The country has since made major developments to the fiber backbone infrastructure, but progress is slow due to lack of government funding.

This imposition of discriminatory pricing by the large companies then results in market inefficiencies and stagnation, and ultimately affects the efficiency of the Internet backbone networks that service the nation.