they framed the dangers and fragility of the centralization of gateways as “the number of phone calls (or legal writs, or infrastructure attacks) that would have to be performed in order to decouple the domestic Internet from the global Internet,” naming 61 countries at ‘severe risk’ for disconnection [@renesys:couldit].

Although disconnection, failure and filtering are more perceivable forms of disruption, the same principles of risk and exposure apply to the degradation of connections. Throttling is not on its own a form of censorship or intent to stifle expression. In the context of Iran, a scarcity of available bandwidth and inadequate infrastructure has created a demonstrable need for limiting resource-intensive services and prioritizing real-time communications traffic, especially in rural markets [@hassani2010qos]. In other cases, often under the terms “quality of service” or “traffic shaping,” throttling is a means of providing higher performance to less bandwidth-intensive applications, through initially provisioning of faster speeds to a connection that is then slowed after a threshold is reached. These practices have spurred heated debate between civil society and telecommunications providers in the United States and Europe within the framework of “network neutrality,” pitting the core principle that communications on the Internet be treated equally against 