a draft text === Text begins === Dear Chairman Dengate-Thrush and CEO Beckstrom, Concerning the Egyptian Internet shutdown, as volunteers participating in the North American At Large Regional Organization who have studied network policy, we the undersigned believe you have a chance to move beyond rhetoric to support the security and stability of the Internet. As contributors to the ICANN community, we expect our Chairperson and CEO to uphold those values. As the IESG and the IAB observed in draft-iab-raven, published as RFC 2804, accommodating the legal intercept requirements of states in network devices would make the system less secure, increase system complexity, and the risk of unintended security failure. The considered technical judgment was, and remains, that wiretapping, even when it is not being exercised, lowers the security of the system. We believe this concern applies also to accommodating endpoint unreachable requirements of states in systems of network devices, as well as flow filter and other disruptive technology requirements. We are also concerned by the possibility of error by national actors attempting to interrupt regional routing. The routing alternatives to the Alexandria - Suez corridor are simply inadequate to support the requirements for Europe - Asia data communications. In addition to these systemic concerns, the proper concern of the entity tasked with the technical coordination of unique endpoint identifiers, we have the following further concerns. Articles 12 and 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, pertaining to privacy and freedom of expression, appear to be the specific targets of intentional violation by the Egyptian government. This should not pass without comment. Significant regional economic activity relies upon the availability of CityNet (Ramadan City), ECC (6 October City), EgyptNetwork (Mansura), and ECC, MEIX, LINKdotNET (Cairo) data centers. The direct economic loss due to governmental action is easy to calculate. The greater loss of the reputation and competitive ability of these data centers, and their operators is harder to calculate, and likely to be much greater than N zero revenue days. However, the economic consequence of abruptly transforming Egypt to a sparse 56kb and VSAT connectivity regime extends far beyond the data centers and access providers. It is profoundly disruptive of the information economy, and of ordinary transaction services. It will result in diminished stability and certainty of commodity prices and availablities. It will raise the price of bread. It will cause hardship, impoverishment, increased morbidity, and mortality, far beyond the social identities of "authority" and "counter-authority". These concerns are not unique to the withdrawal of prefixes at 16:00 UTC on January 27, and 09:00 UTC on January 28 -- the "Egyptian Disconnection". Opportunistic and endemic network partition, rate limiting, and filtering are practiced by some governments. The practices which directly reduce the security and stability of the Internet must not be allowed to pass without comment because they are perpetrated by governments. Sincerely, the undersigned === Text ends ===