On Thursday, the White House held a meeting with representatives from Amazon.com, Google (part of Alphabet), Microsoft, Cloudflare, and civil society advocates to promote the idea of U.S. technology companies providing additional digital bandwidth for government-funded tools that help users evade internet censorship.
These tools, which receive support from the U.S.-backed Open Technology Fund (OTF), have experienced a significant increase in usage in countries such as Russia, Iran, Myanmar, and other authoritarian regimes known for their stringent internet censorship.
During the meeting, OTF's president, Laura Cunningham, emphasized the need for tech companies to consider offering discounted or subsidized server bandwidth to accommodate the rapidly growing demand for virtual private network (VPN) applications funded by OTF. She informed Reuters, "In recent years, we have witnessed a dramatic rise in VPN usage, primarily among users in Russia and Iran. For a decade, we supported around nine million VPN users monthly, and that figure has now more than quadrupled."
VPNs enable users to conceal their identities and alter their online locations, allowing them to bypass geographic content restrictions or evade government censorship by routing their internet traffic through external servers beyond governmental control.
The OTF specifically supports VPNs that are tailored for use in countries with restricted internet access. Following Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the U.S. increased its funding for VPNs backed by the OTF, as reported exclusively by Reuters at that time.
Since then, the organization has received additional financial support from the U.S. State Department through its “Surge and Sustain Fund for Anti-Censorship Technology,” an initiative established during the Biden administration’s Summit for Democracy.
However, the OTF has faced challenges in meeting the heightened demand in nations like Russia, Myanmar, and Iran, where internet censorship severely limits access to external information.
According to Cunningham, approximately 46 million individuals utilize U.S.-backed VPNs each month. However, she noted that a significant portion of the budget is consumed by the expenses associated with hosting this network traffic on private sector servers.
"We aim to accommodate these additional users, but our resources are insufficient to meet the rising demand," she stated.
Representatives from Amazon Web Services, Google, and Microsoft did not provide an immediate response to Reuters' request for comments.
A spokesperson for Cloudflare mentioned that the company is collaborating with researchers to enhance the documentation of internet shutdowns and censorship.