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The Verge is obvioulsy a non-credible source. Or does that just apply to stories editors don't want to publish (*ahem* twitter *ahem) ?

What a terrible article. Here Slashdot editors, a better one from a no-name site that actually gets the facts right :

https://www.lowyat.net/2018/152301/amd-begin-distributing-firmware-updates-patch-spectre-vulnerability/

Or just use the damn primary source :

http://www.amd.com/en/corporate/speculative-execution

1) US maintains a list of blacklisted countries accused of facilitating online piracy by not implementing surveillance and copyright enforcement.
Malaysia just promised to comply and thus got off the list. The OP topic may be a result of this.
http://www.zdnet.com/malaysia-dropped-from-us-piracy-watch-list-2062304676/

2) Malaysia's biggest ISP TM introduced for it's "fastest" internet service UNIFI (a max. 20MBit SDSL connection) blocking of port 6667. This started some weeks ago (August/2012). No official statement so far. Other ports work fine though (e.g. 6666).
http://forum.lowyat.net/topic/2477506/all

ISPs really should have better IDS on outgoing traffic. At the very least they should be dropping the malicious traffic

My home ISP just started outbound blocking traffic from DSL customers to port 25 a few days ago, which has stirred up some controversy. Maybe I'm just imagining things, but I believe my connection has been faster since then. We're always suffering from bandwidth problems (the downside of being on the end of a very long cable across the Pacific) so anything that eliminates our share of 100 billion daily spams clogging the line is a good thing in my book.

On mail servers I use spamdyke to immediately drop connections from end-user IP addresses (using the reject-ip-in-cc-rdns rule and Spamhaus PBL) and it's been remarkably effective.

If everyone did this, the botnets would be useless.

Actually, it didn't keep people offline in Asia. It just made international Internet connections incredibly slow.

+5 Informative???

It kept plenty of people offline in Asia. The existence of some people in Asia who weren't kept offline doesn't mean that it didn't keep people offline.

Here in Malaysia, the greater internet was pretty much inacessible that first night for anyone on the main TMnet backbone. It came and went over the next week, and it's really only yesterday that things are more or less back to normal (except with 10% packet loss where it's normally 0%).

First off, I think the question isn't that realistic. Too much commerce depends on global connectivity, and it's not really in the interest of any significant power structure to change that.

But to answer the question:

In smaller countries I think international connectivity is particularly important. Aside from chat/IM, here in Malaysia people spend almost all of their online time surfing foreign sites. English speakers mainly hit the US, and a bit of UK and Australia, while Chinese speakers are on the Hong Kong and Taiwan sites. There's not enough critical mass to build up that much local community content; a few tech sites like lowyat.net and a bunch of blogs, but mostly people are on yahoo groups, etc. The fact that most Malaysians are near-fluent or fluent in one or more major world languages like English and Chinese exacerbates this. (Note on English fluency: Fluent when they want to be. On the lowyat.net forums you'll be reading SMS-speak-influenced Manglish, a clipped, rhythmic flavour of English spiced heavily with words from Malay and various Chinese dialects)

At the same time, clearly American companies are making money at this. Ad syndication programs are showing me Malaysian banner ads when I surf global sites like Yahoo. Amazon.com ships so much stuff here there's a special room in the main post office in Kuala Lumpur just for collecting your Amazon orders. US companies like Fedex, Motorola, Kelloggs, and Citibank do a lot of business here and host their ".com.my" web sites in the US which is more efficient for them.

In fact, due to the more competitive American hosting market, an awful lot of nominally Malaysian sites are actually hosted in the US. When I want to look up the online menu for the restaurant down the street, my web traffic goes all the way around the world.

By now, in places like this anyway, things are so interdependent that an internet with national borders would be unthinkable. I doubt anyone would bother to use it.