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

The announcement was made on Wednesday, but the circumstances surrounding the sudden death on Tuesday of Nabil Bukhalid, 65, while he was spending the holidays in London, were unclear. Some say he suffered a cardiac arrest, others a stroke. What is sure, however, is that this sad news has sent shock waves through the Internet community in Lebanon and abroad.

This former biomedical engineer, who in the late 1980s strove to connect the American University of Beirut, which was isolated because of the Civil War in Lebanon at the time, to its academic peers around the world, was the one who brought the Internet to Lebanon in the postwar years and who, lately, saved the “lb” national domain name from the country’s economic and financial crisis.

‘The future of Lebanon is at stake’

“What if something bad happened to him?,” asked Najib Korban, then chief information officer at the Office of the Minister of State for Administrative Reform (OMSAR), when speaking to L’Orient-Le Jour in September 2021. At the time, it was a rhetorical question, but now it bears an unfortunate foreboding, while caretaker Minister of State Najla Riachi this week told L’Orient-Le Jour that she “rang the alarm bell” to her counterparts in the cabinet and other Lebanese officials. When asked who will take over the maintenance and financing of servers located abroad and hosting the Lebanese domain name registry (DNS), the minister acknowledged that there is no immediate solution. “It is the future of Lebanon that is at stake,” she said.

“In a normal country, I would have had answers to give you, but here the institutions are blocked, the country is blocked,” she said. Lebanon has been without a president since Oct. 31, when Michel Aoun’s term in office came to an end, and without a full-fledged cabinet since May when Najib Mikati’s government assumed caretaker status following parliamentary elections.

Shaken by this unexpected death, Riachi paid tribute to Bukhalid saying, “He was a great man. A patriotic gentleman. An expert with a big heart.” She added that had recently reassured her about the continuity of his pro bono collaboration with her ministry, saying he told her recently “If you need anything, I’m here.”

Another close collaborator, who declined to be named, said Bukhalid was a “genius.”

In order to understand the impact that the death of Bukhalid could have on the Lebanese web, it is necessary to go back at least to the year 2020 when he saved at the very last moment the national network from the yoke of the country’s ongoing crisis, and at most to the three past decades during which the negligence of the successive Lebanese authorities was established and systematized. This was despite the countless attempts by Bukhalid and his collaborators to bring them to their senses, especially regarding the establishment of a “national entity” overseeing the management of the “lb” DNS. While Law No. 81 on e-transactions and data protection, which establishes this entity, was enacted in 2018, some of its provisions remain inoperative to date.

Founder, savior and creditor of the national network, Bukhalid has succeeded over the past two years in saving the “lb” DNS, finalizing its migration to a cloud abroad. In August 2021, Bukhalid told L’Orient-Le Jour, “My goal at the time was to save the registry and not interrupt the service on the web,” turning a blind eye to the tens of thousands of dollars of his own funds that he used to do so.

Mission accomplished, but “it is a one-man show, which is neither reliable nor sustainable,” Korban underlined back then. He was right. The “Abu Internet,” as many people in Lebanon call him, has gone, leaving behind his wife and his three children, and a country that is once again in distress and that he tried at all costs to keep connected. 

This article was originally published in French in L'Orient-Le Jour. Translation by Joelle El Khoury.

Nabil Bukhalid, le Monsieur qui avait connecté le Liban à l'Internet, n’est plus