Nabil Bukhalid, the gentleman who connected Lebanon to the Internet, is no longer

The announcement fell on Wednesday, but vagueness reigns as to the circumstances surrounding the sudden death Tuesday of Nabil Bukhalid, 65, while on vacation in London. Some evoke a cardiac arrest, others a CVA. What is certain, however, is that the shock wave of this sad news has not finished spreading within the Internet community in Lebanon and abroad. Because this former biomedical engineer, who in the late 1980s was trying to connect the American University of Beirut, isolated due to the civil war, to his academic peers around the world, was the one who had brought the Internet to Lebanon in the post-war years and which recently saved the national domain name “.lb” from the country’s economic and financial crisis.

“It is the future of Lebanon that is at stake”

“What if something happened to him?” “, confided to us in September 2021 Najib Corban, then head of IT services at the office of the Minister of State for Administrative Reform (OMSAR). A rhetorical question that now sounds like a grim reality, while outgoing minister Najla Riachi told L’Orient-Le Jour this week that she was sounding the “alarm bell” to her government counterparts and other Lebanese officials. Because to the question of knowing who will take over for the maintenance and financing of the servers posted abroad and hosting the names of the domains (DNS) Lebanese, the minister recognized that there is no immediate solution. “It’s the future of Lebanon that is at stake,” she stressed, however.

For memory

“.lb” domains: how the Lebanese internet almost disappeared from the web

“In a normal country, I would have had answers to give you, but here the institutions are blocked, the country is blocked”, she said sorry, while Lebanon has been without a president since November and without a full government. exercise since last May. Saying she was shaken by this unexpected death, Najla Riachi paid tribute to the man who was Nabil Bukhalid: “A great gentleman. A patriotic gentleman. An expert with a big heart”, who had recently reassured her about the continuity of her pro bono collaboration with this ministry. “If you need anything, I’m here,” he had recently told her, she recalls. Another close collaborator, wishing to remain anonymous, speaks of him as “genius”.

Because to fully understand the impact on the Lebanese Web that the death of Nabil Bukhalid could have, we must go back at least to the year 2020 when the sixty-year-old had therefore saved the national network from the yoke of the crisis in extremis, and at the most to the previous three decades during which the negligence of successive Lebanese authorities was established and systematized. This despite countless attempts by Nabil Bukhalid and his collaborators to make them listen to reason, in particular for the establishment of a “national authority” overseeing the management of “.lb” Internet domain names. While Law No. 81 on electronic transactions and the protection of personal data and establishing this authority was passed in 2018, some of its provisions remain inoperative to date.

Founder, savior and therefore creditor of the national network, Nabil Bukhalid has nevertheless succeeded over the past two years in safeguarding the “.lb” DNS, finalizing their migration to a cloud (a technique for outsourcing IT services to remote servers) at the foreigner. In August 2021, Nabil Bukhalid explained to L’Orient-Le Jour that his only goal was to “save the .lb domain registry without creating interruptions on the Web”, turning a blind eye to the few tens of thousands of dollars that he had already dug out of his own money to do this. Mission certainly accomplished, but this “one man show is neither reliable nor sustainable”, underlined Najib Corban. And he was right. The “Abou Internet”, as many call him in Lebanon, is gone, leaving behind his wife and three children, but also a Lebanon once again in distress and which he was trying at all costs to keep connected.