In February 2021, during anti-government protests by peasants and farmers, the internet suddenly stopped working in 14 of the 22 districts of Haryana, a state bordering India. New Delhi. In the same period, mobile connections were blocked throughout the Myanmar, following the military coup that ousted the legitimate government (the situation, even today, has not returned to normal). The same happened in January in Uganda, where the internet was shut down nationwide just hours before the (sixth) election of President Yoweri Museveni. In NigeriaInstead, the government blocked access to Twitter to protest the social network’s decision to suspend President Buhari’s account.
Similar situations have occurred (according to what documented in a recent Access Now report) in Colombia, Ecuador, Turkey, Russia, Sudan, Indonesia and other nations, for a total of 50 blackouts in 21 different states in the first 5 months of 2021 alone. less prolonged is now one of the favorite weapons of dictators and governments with a low democratic rate, which use it to prevent the dissemination of free information and to nip the organization of protests and demonstrations in the bud.
the analysis
Splinternet, the fragmentation of the network has served. And we need to worry
by Arturo Di Corinto
The use of voluntary network blackouts is grown dramatically in recent years: if in 2013 only a few isolated cases were documented, in 2019 these had risen to 213, before dropping to 155 in 2020 following the postponement of the elections and the lockdowns caused by the pandemic (but with a duration longer than 49%). Overall, of the 850 blackouts identified in the last 10 years, 768 have occurred since 2016 (with India absolute record holder by number of interruptions).
These are not just total blockages involving an entire nation, but also blackouts targeting a particular area (such as the one that recently hit the Panjshir region of Afghanistan, the only one not to have fallen into the hands of the Taliban) or that target specific sites or social networks. Not only that: these blackouts can be of indefinite duration (like that of Myanmar) or be organized only at very specific times, as often happens in India.
These authoritarian actions therefore aim to nip any protests in the bud or hide the brutal repressions in progress from the world, even at the price of very serious economic damage: in Myanmar, for example, prolonged Internet outages are estimated to have caused losses of $ 2.1 billion, or 2.5% of GDP. These numbers are not surprising, considering that today the digital economy is worth about 18 trillion dollars, that is 20% of the global gross domestic product.
However, it would be wrong to think that only poorly (or not at all) democratic nations are tempted to press the red button and prevent access to the Internet: as reported by Jigsaw, Google think-tank, even in the United States a law has been proposed in the past (later abandoned following protests) which would have given the president the power to shut down access to the Internet in an emergency.
In short, that of Internet blackouts is a phenomenon that goes hand in hand with the so-called Splinternet, the fragmentation of the network that allows individual nations to control incoming and outgoing traffic at will. If the best known case is that of the great Chinese firewall, the Iranian project to create a real national intranet should not be underestimated either (dubbed the National Information Network) and not even the Russia’s experiments to completely disconnect its network (RuNet) from the rest of the Internet.
Tutorial
What is a VPN, what is it for, how to use it and how much it costs
by Andrea Daniele Signorelli
Are there any ways to get around these blocks and hinder the transformation of the global Internet into many small national or regional networks? According to Access Now, the remedies are technical and political: from the use of Vpn, virtual private networks that allow you to access even blocked sites and services (also maintaining anonymity), up to initiatives such as KeepItOn, which offers technical, political and legal support in order to end Internet blackouts as soon as possible. And to prevent them from happening in the future.
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