The White House met with representatives from Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Cloudflare, and civil society activists to encourage US tech giants to offer more digital bandwidth for government-funded tools to circumvent internet censorship.
Tools backed by the Open Technology Fund (OTF) gained popularity in Russia, Iran, Myanmar and other nations with watchful eye on the Internet. The OTF offered discounted or subsidised server bandwidth to meet the rapidly growing demand for virtual private network (VPN) applications, according to the organisation’s president Laura Cunningham.
Over the last few years, we have seen an explosion in demand for VPNs, largely driven by users in Russia and Iran. For a decade, we routinely supported around nine million VPN users each month, and now that number has more than quadrupled.
VPNs help users hide their identity and change their location online, often to circumvent geographic restrictions on content or to bypass government censorship technologies. Users route traffic through external servers outside of government control.
Since the outbreak of the war in Ukraine, the OTF received support for its budget from the US State Department through the Surge and Sustain Fund for Anti-Censorship Technology, an initiative established by US President Joe Biden. However, the organisation failed to meet the increased demand in countries, such as Ukraine, Russia, Myanmar, and Iran, where access to external information was allegedly restricted.
According to Cunningham, around 46 million people a month now use VPNs. She added that a significant portion of the budget went to the cost of hosting all of the network traffic on private sector servers.
We want to support these additional users, but we don’t have the resources to keep up with this surging demand.
