The White House convened a meeting with representatives of Amazon, Alphabet's Google, Microsoft, Cloudflare and civil society activists on Thursday in a bid to encourage US tech giants to offer more digital bandwidth for government-funded internet censorship evasion tools.
The tools, supported by the US-backed Open Technology Fund (OTF), have seen a surge of usage in Russia, Iran, Myanmar and authoritarian states that heavily censor the internet.
OTF's pitch to tech companies at the meeting was to help offer discounted or subsidized server bandwidth to meet the fast-growing demand for virtual private network (VPN) applications that OTF funds, the organization’s president, Laura Cunningham, told Reuters.
“Over the last few years, we have seen an explosion in demand for VPNs, largely driven by users in Russia and Iran,” Cunningham said. “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 online location, often to bypass geographic restrictions on content or to evade government censorship technology, by routing internet traffic through external servers outside of that government’s control.
The US government launched its first Internet blockage circumvention tool in 2009 when the Iranian government expanded its censorship during anti-government protests. Later, the OTF was created to oversee and coordinate the US government’s Internet anti-censorship effort, annually receiving around $15 million in mid-2010s.
Iranians have long been the biggest users of the US-provided and other VPNs, since thousands of websites and all major social media applications are blocked by the government both for political and religious purposes.
The OTF specifically backs VPNs that are designed to work in states that restrict access to the internet. The U.S. injected increased funding into VPNs supported by the OTF following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Reuters reported at the time.
The organization has since received a boost to its budget from the US State Department via its “Surge and Sustain Fund for Anti-Censorship Technology”, an initiative created at the Biden administration’s Summit for Democracy.
But it has struggled to meet increased demand in countries like Russia, Myanmar, and Iran, where internet censorship heavily restricts access to outside information.
Around 46 million people a month now use US-backed VPNs, Cunningham said, but added that a sizeable chunk of the budget was taken up by the cost of hosting all that 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,” she said.
Representatives of Amazon Web Services, Google, and Microsoft did not immediately respond to a request from Reuters for comment.
A Cloudflare spokesperson said the firm was working with researchers to "better document internet shutdowns and censorship."
With reporting by Reuters
