As countries like Russia, Iran, Myanmar and other authoritarian states continue to severely censor the Internet, the demand for VPN services has never been higher.
That’s why the US is now urging big tech to better support circumvention software. On Thursday, September 5, the White House met with representatives from Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Cloudflare and civil society activists to commit to providing more digital bandwidth for government-funded internet censorship-evasion tools, Reuters reported.
The “discounted or subsidized server bandwidth” proposal comes from the Open Technology Fund (OTF) to meet the growing demand for VPNs. The US-backed organization supports technology projects aimed at countering online censorship and fighting repressive surveillance.
The need for VPNs
“Over the past few years, we've seen an explosion in demand for VPNs, driven largely by users in Russia and Iran,” OTF president Laura Cunningham told Reuters.
Both Russian and Iranian authorities are reportedly building ever-higher fences around their domestic internet. When browsing the Kremlin’s RuNet, for example, you can’t access sites like Facebook, Instagram, and X unless you use a VPN, in addition to an ever-growing list of websites and content. Iran’s internet is one of the worst in the world for connectivity, and experts blame increased government censorship for this.
Online censorship is on the rise globally. According to Access Now’s annual report, governments continued to use communication platform blocks on a massive scale in 2023. Specifically, they imposed or maintained 53 platform blocks in 25 countries, compared to 39 blocks in 29 countries the previous year. Nine months later, 2024 will continue to see this worrying trend.
A VPN (virtual private network) is the perfect tool to bypass government-imposed blocks as it spoofs the location of your real IP address. This way, it tricks your Internet Service Provider (ISP) into thinking you're browsing from a completely different country in just a few clicks and grants you access to otherwise blocked websites or apps.
In 2024 alone, Proton VPN, one of the best free VPNs on the market, saw usage spikes in 12 countries as users attempted to bypass government-imposed internet restrictions. These include Brazil, Venezuela, Turkey, Myanmar, and Pakistan.
As mentioned above, OTF specifically supports those VPN services designed to work in countries that most restrict access to free internet.
Since demand for VPNs skyrocketed following the invasion of Ukraine, the Biden administration has increased the budget to fund anti-censorship technology. However, OTF still struggles to balance 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.
That's why the organization is now calling on tech companies to do their part to support the fight for an open web.
“For a decade, we supported about nine million VPN users every month, and now that number has more than quadrupled,” Cunningham said. “We want to support these additional users, but we don't have the resources to meet this growing demand.”
