Who owns the infrastucture will always have the ultimate control.
No matter how revolutionary your communication service is the guys with the cables can shut you off in a snap if needed. The Egyptian case is emblematic.
When a country is in chaos and internet and everything are still online it means that the government have control on much more than the infrastucture. And that is far more scaring than a shut down.
I'm not so sure of that. A quick search put the figure at just 3.4% of GDP [1].
Even if a lot of sales do happen online, many of them could shift back to phone calls relatively easily.
Obviously there would be a significant impact, but I think the Internet is still a long way away from being something that simply can't be turned off.
I was more referring to credit card transactions at just about any store. Even if the store's processing machine uses dial-up, there's a good chance that the vendor's backend is dependent on an Internet connection.
I admit that this is biased towards the West, and it's possible that in places Egypt cash might be more popular than it is in the West.
That's just one small piece of the puzzle though. You also have to think about sales that take place through email communication. You have to think about stocks being bought/sold online. Not that some of these things can't be replaced by more primitive means, but that is an undeniable huge hit to an economy that has to suddenly adjust to do things by analog means.
No matter how revolutionary your communication service is the guys with the cables can shut you off in a snap if needed. The Egyptian case is emblematic.
When a country is in chaos and internet and everything are still online it means that the government have control on much more than the infrastucture. And that is far more scaring than a shut down.