I was thinking the same thing. So far this tactic has not worked well in the cases where it has been tried, the last gasp of a desperate autocrat.

On the other hand, banning the media has worked well in the past, such as when China ordered the media out of Tiananmen before getting serious at the end. The problem is that nowadays with cellphones and twitter, banning the media accomplishes nothing because that merely deputizes the entire populace to become journalists. At Tiananmen no one could post to the internet from their cell phone. Things have changed since then. Now the only way to stop the media is to shut down the internet, cell phones, and land lines that might contact fax machines. But this leaves the autocrat with no reliable feedback about what is going on on the ground, while people manage to communicate news reports via satellite phone, ham radio, pigeons, across the border local wifi, and who knows what else.

A big question is what will governments do in response to this loss of control, something they can not stand? Something like the great firewall of china is one solution - leave the internet running but have the ability to monitor 100% of net traffic in real time and block prohibited communication instantly. In the US there is an approach of monitoring traffic for keywords (but no blocking) combined with psyops such as persona management and media control in order to get the sheep to go in the direction the herder wants them to go.

Yes, it's much better to monitor and manipulate than it is to openly oppose the crowd. The general populace is often bigger than you are. Nowadays, they can coordinate and communicate.

If the Tiananmen protestors had waited until this moment in 2011 to protest, then you would have seen the fall of China. As it is, I suspect that the Chinese government was forced to wise up about controlling an Internet-connected populace.

As for psy-ops and media control, that's been going on since the late 19th century, and was down to a science by the early 20th.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6718420906413643126#

So far, North Korea hasn't fallen. All governments eventually fall; what timeline were you thinking of?

But North Korea's access has never been open by any stretch of the imagination to start with.

The Japanese monarchy has supposedly been around since 660 BC.

If they don't govern anymore, are they still a government?

The Japanese monarchy has gone through cycles of governance and non-governance, remember the shogunate? I have no reason to believe that it won't happen again 50, 100, or 200 years from now, without ever having broken the chain of succession.

The chain of succession has been broken a few times, most prominently by assassination, where the next candidate assuming the throne had, ahem, well, ample reasons to be glad they hadn't invented DNA testing yet. The unbroken succession is largely an article of faith, concocted in the late 1800s in the service of turning an often fractious bunch into a modern nation-state.

It's entirely possible. Most non-governing monarchies still have themselves inserted into a position of power and simply rubber stamp the actions of the governing bodies. In the UK the Queen (or future King) has the ability to Veto a piece of legislation. Similarly in Canada, Australia and New Zealand the Governor General holds the veto amongst the other reserve powers.

However, the Japanese Emperor has no 'reserve' powers. So its ability to take power may be more restricted, however there's always a good chance that they would be restored to power in the event of an uprising.

Monarchs have had civil servants do the governing for a long long time.

They don't want to govern, they just want to rule. And Monarchies still rule in most of the first world.

THATS NOT TRUE! were ahmericah! fuck yea! we aint got no monarchs! Our president does not have the power to send troops unofficially into other countries without declaring war or spread propaganda to change public opinion into supporting an invasion of a country.

Burma shut down Internet access during its 2007 protests and so far its government is still in place.

Burma's internet use is almost non-existant. OpenNet Initiative says only 0.2% [1] out of population of 55M are internet users. I'd rather be making a comparison towards North Korea, than to Egypt, where 24.3% [2] of the population is using internet.

[1] - http://opennet.net/research/profiles/burma

[2] - http://opennet.net/research/profiles/egypt

I've been wondering the converse: if having an open internet will be an indicator that true reform has taken place.

Whatever the case, we live in interesting times.

America has an open internet, and we're pretty awful at reform. Apples and oranges, though. We're replacing rotten floorboards and broken balcony rails; they're building a house up from rubble.