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As the world gets more connected, rising incidents of internet shutdowns and censorship are tearing apart the internet as we know it. New tech solutions are evolving to keep together the pieces.
CHIARA CASTRO
Think for a moment how many times in a day you use the internet. Whether you lazy scroll your social media feed on the train to work, reply to an important email, send your university assignment, read a newspaper, renew your ID, or pay your bills. There’s a bitter irony that as the world gets increasingly dependent on an internet connection, the World Wide Web is in its lowest shape.
The internet went dark 283 times across 39 countries in 2023 - the highest number of internet shutdowns digital rights group Access Now recorded since 2016. People in Myanmar largely remain in digital darkness for another year, while 25 nations restricted social media access over 50 times. All this happened while the likes of China, Russia, and Iran were busy building higher fences around their national “sovereign internet.” The dream of a free and globally connected online world fading away, for the 13th consecutive year.
“Governments and powermongers are increasingly imposing internet shutdowns to silence dissent, shroud grave human rights abuses, and control the flow of information,” Felicia Anthonio, #KeepItOn Campaign Manager at Access Now, told me, as her team documented 1,500 incidents between 2016 and 2023.
Seven months in, 2024 is set to continue this vicious circle of decline. Pakistan, Senegal, Kenya, and Turkey are some of the countries that have already restricted the internet in some forms so far. For the first time, a Western democracy join the party in May, when the French government blocked TikTok in New Caledonia as part of an emergency plan to quell some violent clashes.
Restrictions can last hours, days, months, or even years. They can affect the whole network, regional connections, or specific websites and platforms. The reasons behind these blocks can differ, too, from protests and elections to natural disasters and school exams. All these incidents, however, have one thing in common. Each one cracks the precious network we all rely on - the internet.
Striking at the tech
After working at Google and now in the open-source world, software developer Serene has been a closer spectator at the deterioration of the global internet’s foundations.
“While censorship has always existed in some form since the beginning of the internet, it has especially escalated within the last 5-10 years,“ she told me. “In terms of technical capability, reach, frequency: the situation is worsening.”
Authorities have indeed sophisticated their tactics. Websites, social platforms, and other online services can be blocked by domain name on a DNS level. This is, for example, how the so-called Great Firewall of China prevents users from browsing foreign websites. Geo-IP blocking is another way to enforce similar restrictions. A more complex method, DPI (deep packet inspection) blocks specific connection protocols or internet traffic by installing MITM (man-in-the-middle) boxes in internet service providers (ISPs) to filter all user connections.
All these techniques are not just, as Serene put it, “anti-human and anti-privacy,” but they also require invasive computations that reduce overall connectivity performances, making the network inevitably more fragile.
“As information environments become increasingly locked by geography, platform, context, and other factors, the architecture of the web is becoming needlessly centralized and weakened, undermining the original vision for a global internet,” said Serene.
Completely shutting down the web takes even more effort as authorities need to take offline the actual physical infrastructure. This can be done by forcing ISPs or telecommunication companies to switch off their servers, for example, or physically destroying cell towers, satellite infrastructure, or under-sea cables.
The collateral damage
Let’s forget for a moment about the tech. The internet isn’t just about cables, servers, software, and computers. It's about people - how they connect with each other.
Andrew Sullivan, President, and CEO of the Internet Society, told me something that struck me back in February, a day after the large-scale outage on Pakistan's election day. “[The people in Pakistan] were all collateral damage.” Even those who were not interested in the election or the protests happening in the background. All suffered the consequences of that decision.
While servers can be turned back on and blocks lifted, the pillar of reliability supporting the network gets slimmer as the web becomes less trustworthy for more users. This not only is bad for social rights (free speech, access to information, and education), but it also translates into huge economic losses. Data suggests that government-imposed internet disruptions have already cost about $53 billion globally since 2019.
“Service providers naturally end up avoiding placing their infrastructure where it is difficult to maintain or users are often cut off,” said Sullivan. “Over time, this means the networks most prone to shutdowns are also, ironically, the ones where the investment in resilience and performance are the lowest.”
The risk of having an ill-performing and unreliable internet doesn’t seem to worry worldwide leaders. Experts are witnessing a rise in social media blocks everywhere, even across countries reluctant to enforce total internet outages (see the New Caledonia case or the US trying to ban TikTok). As Anthonio from Access Now explains, authorities may perceive these practices as “more acceptable” or “less harmful” compared to total internet shutdowns, despite the reverse being true.
How to save the free web
As we have seen, the web as we know it is in a dire state. No matter that people have learned to use software like VPN or proxies to spoof their IP and bypass restrictions. Authorities increasingly crack down on their usage with similar censorship tactics.
“In some ways, the internet as we know it’s already broken, at least compared to the internet of 10/20 years ago,” software developer Serene told me. “In 10 years time, the internet could look like an even worse version of the current infowar; or it could be a totally reimagined internet that truly benefits humanity. Which scenario plays out is up to all of us.”
The latter is exactly what companies like those founded by Serene are working on. Launched last year in beta, Snowstorm uses WebRTC to create a connection between the network of volunteer-run proxies and users looking to escape censorship. WebRTC is a protocol that video chat apps use to establish peer-to-peer connections, hence more difficult to block.
Snowstorm seeks to rethink the traditional way software like VPNs work. The goal isn’t just to protect against surveillance and bypass online restrictions, but also push for a different internet architecture where censorship and surveillance “becomes largely irrelevant,” Serene explains. From a centralized model to a network where routing does not rely as heavily on a small number of ISPs.
“People clearly demand internet freedom, and this sentiment will only grow, especially if censorship continues to escalate,” said Serene. “We are not too late; a free and open global internet is inevitable if people demand it and take concrete steps to make it happen.”
If you want to help Snowstorm to create a more resilient free web, you can join the community here.