With countries like Russia, Iran, Myanmar and other authoritarian states heavily censoring the internet, the demand for VPN services has never been higher.
This is why the US is now pushing Big Tech to better support circumvention tools. On Thursday, September 5, the White House met with representatives from Amazon, Google, Microsft, Cloudflare and civil society activists to pledge to provide more digital bandwidth for government-funded tools to circumvent internet censorship – Reuters reported.
The pitch for “discounted or subsidized server bandwidth” comes from the Open Technology Fund (OTF) to meet the rapidly growing demand for VPNs. The US-backed organization backs technology projects aimed at combating online censorship and fighting repressive surveillance.
The Need for VPNs
“Over the past few years, we’ve seen an explosion in demand for VPNs, largely driven by users in Russia and Iran,” said Laura Cunningham, OTF president. told Reuters.
Both Russian and Iranian authorities are reportedly busy building ever-higher fences around their national internets. For example, when browsing the Kremlin’s RuNet, you can’t reach Facebook, Instagram, and X without a VPN, along with an ever-growing list of websites and content. Iran’s internet is among the worst in the world in terms of connectivity, and experts blame the government’s ramp-up of censorship.
Online censorship is increasing worldwide. According to Access Now Annual ReportGovernments continued to use communication platform blocks extensively in 2023. Specifically, they imposed or maintained 53 platform blocks in 25 countries, up from 39 blocks in 29 countries the previous year. Nine months later, in 2024, this worrying trend is set to continue.
A VPN (virtual private network) is the perfect tool to bypass such government-imposed blocks. This is because it spoofs your real IP address location. In this way, it tricks your Internet Service Provider (ISP) into thinking that you are surfing from a completely different country with just a few clicks, and gives you access to otherwise blocked websites or applications.
In 2024 alone, one of the best free VPNs on the market, Proton VPN, recorded spikes in usage in 12 countries as users attempted to circumvent government-imposed internet restrictions. These included Brazil, Venezuela, Turkey, Myanmar, and Pakistan.
As mentioned earlier, OTF specifically supports VPN services designed to work in countries where access to the free internet is most restricted.
Since the spike in VPN demands following the invasion of Ukraine, the Biden administration has the budget increased to fund anti-censorship technology. Yet OTF still struggles to balance the needs of the 46 million people per month currently using U.S.-backed VPNs with the costs of hosting all that network traffic on private-sector servers.
That’s why the organization is now asking technology companies to do their part in the fight for an open web.
“For a decade, we routinely supported about nine million VPN users per 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 keep up with this surge in demand.”