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As the likes of Russia, Iran, Myanmar, and other authoritarian states keep heavily censoring the internet, the demand for VPN services has never been higher.
This is why the US now urges Big Tech to better support circumvention software. On Thursday, September 5, the White House met with representatives of Amazon, Google, Microsft, Cloudflare, and civil society activists to pledge the offering of more digital bandwidth for government-funded internet censorship evasion tools – Reuters reported.
The pitch for “discounted or subsidized server bandwidth” comes from the Open Technology Fund (OTF) to meet the fast-growing demand for VPNs. The US-backed organization supports technology projects aimed at countering online censorship and combating repressive surveillance.
The need for VPNs
“Over the last few years, we have seen an explosion in demand for VPNs, largely driven by users in Russia and Iran,” the OTF’s President, Laura Cunningham, told Reuters.
Both Russian and Iranian authorities are reportedly busy building higher and higher fences around their national internet. When surfing the Kremlin’s RuNet, for example, the likes of Facebook, Instagram, and X cannot be accessed unless using a VPN, alongside an ever-growing list of websites and content. Internet in Iran is among the worst worldwide for connectivity, and experts blame the government’s censorship boost for it.
Online censorship is actually on the rise globally. According to Access Now’s annual report, governments continued to use communication platform blocks heavily in 2023. Specifically, they impose or maintain 53 platform blocks across 25 countries, up from 39 blocks in 29 countries the year before. Nine months in, 2024 is set to continue this worrying trend.
A VPN (virtual private network) is the perfect tool to bypass such government’s imposed blocks. That’s because it spoofs your real IP address location. In this way, it tricks your internet service provider (ISP) into thinking you’re browsing from a completely different country within a few clicks and grants you access to otherwise blocked websites or applications.
In 2024 alone, one of the best free VPNs on the market, Proton VPN recorded usage spikes in 12 countries as users sought to bypass government-imposed internet restrictions. These include Brazil, Venezuela, Turkey, Myanmar, and Pakistan.
As mentioned earlier, OTF specifically supports those VPN services designed to work in the countries that most restrict access to the free internet.
Since the spike in VPN demands following the invasion of Ukraine, the Biden administration boosted the budget for its funding of anti-censorship tech. Yet, OTF still struggles to juggle the needs of 46 million people a month currently using US-backed VPNs with the cost of hosting all that network traffic on private sector servers.
This is why the organization is now asking tech companies to play their part in supporting the fight for an open web.
“For a decade, we routinely supported around nine million VPN users each month, and now that number has more than quadrupled,” said Cunningham. “We want to support these additional users, but we don’t have the resources to keep up with this surging demand.”
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