The Egyptian Internet shutdown could possibly cost the country $90 million, according to preliminary estimates from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).
Telecom and Internet services account for 3-4 percent of GDP in Egypt, or a loss of about $18 million per day, OECD said. The long-term impact could be greater, however, since Egypt cut off high-tech firms that the Egyptian government has worked hard to attract to the region.
The Internet downtime "will make it much more difficult in the future to attract foreign companies and assure them that the networks will remain reliable," OECD said.
The sector was worth about $1 billion last year and attracted customers from around the world. Vodafone, for example, has a call center in Egypt that services customers in New Zealand. As a result, Vodafone's Egyptian staff of 180 was unreachable when the Web went down, and Vodafone had to hire 100 new workers in New Zealand to handle the call volume.
"Therefore, while the direct costs of shutting down telecommunication networks are still significant, the true social and economic costs will be much higher," OECD continued. "Egypt will need to regain the confidence of customers around the globe if it still wants to be considered a key ICT hub for business again."
In a Thursday webcast hosted by digital activist group Access, Egyptian blogger Tarek Amr suggested that the Internet shutdown didn't even have the intended effect and in fact resulted in even bigger rallies.
"The regime first turned off the Internet to stop the protestors. They thought this would prevent people from communicating with each other and ruin the protest itself and make people not able to organize," Amr said. "But what happened on the ground [was] the protests became bigger even without the Internet. In fact, everybody out there is calling it an Internet revolution, but the fact is, we had the Internet revolution withoout having access to the Internet at the time."
Nontheless, Jillian York with the Harvard University Berkman Center said she has been monitoring Egyptian activity on Twitter in recent days, and has witnessed chatter about rallies and meet-ups after the government-imposed curfews.
"I'm certainly skeptical of calling anything a Facebook or Twitter revolution, [but] nevertheless, we've heard how these demonstrations were helped along by social media," York said.
She pointed out, however, that many countries do not have strong Internet penetration rates. She pointed to Syria as a country with the most potential for using the Web as a rallying point, despite the filtering.