US calls on Big Tech to help evade online censors in Russia, Iran

By James Pearson

(Reuters) - The White House convened a meeting with representatives of Amazon.com, Alphabet's Google, Microsoft, Cloudflare and civil society activists on Thursday in a bid to encourage U.S. tech giants to offer more digital bandwidth for government-funded internet censorship evasion tools.

The tools, supported by the U.S.-backed Open Technology Fund (OTF), have seen a surge of usage in Russia, Iran, Myanmar and authoritarian states that heavily censor the internet.

OTF's pitch to tech companies at the meeting was to help offer discounted or subsidized server bandwidth to meet the fast-growing demand for virtual private network (VPN) applications that OTF funds, the organisation’s president, Laura Cunningham, told Reuters.

“Over the last few years, we have seen an explosion in demand for VPNs, largely driven by users in Russia and Iran,” Cunningham said. “For a decade, we routinely supported around nine million VPN users each month, and now that number has more than quadrupled.”

VPNs help users hide their identity and change their online location, often to bypass geographic restrictions on content or to evade government censorship technology, by routing internet traffic through external servers outside of that government’s control.

The OTF specifically backs VPNs that are designed to work in states that restrict access to the internet. The U.S. injected increased funding into VPNs supported by the OTF following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Reuters exclusively reported at the time.

The organisation has since received a boost to its budget from the U.S. State Department via its “Surge and Sustain Fund for Anti-Censorship Technology”, an initiative created at the Biden administration’s Summit for Democracy. 

But it has struggled to meet increased demand in countries like Russia, Myanmar, and Iran, where internet censorship heavily restricts access to outside information.

Around 46 million people a month now use U.S.-backed VPNs, Cunningham said, but added that a sizeable chunk of the budget was taken up by the cost of hosting all that network traffic on private sector servers.

“We want to support these additional users, but we don't have the resources to keep up with this surging demand,” she said.

Representatives of Amazon Web Services, Google, and Microsoft did not immediately respond to a request from Reuters for comment.

A Cloudflare spokesperson said the firm was working with researchers to "better document internet shutdowns and censorship."

(This story has been refiled to clarify that the pitch at the meeting came from OTF, in paragraph 3)

(Reporting by James Pearson; Editing by Bill Berkrot)