US asks Big Tech to help circumvent online censors in Russia, Iran By Reuters

By James Pearson

(Reuters) – The White House, aiming to persuade U.S. tech giants to provide more digital bandwidth for government-funded Internet censorship circumvention tools, held a meeting with representatives of Amazon.com (NASDAQ: ), Alphabet’s Google (NASDAQ:) , Microsoft (NASDAQ: ), Cloudflare (NYSE: ) and others on Thursday.

The tools have seen increased use in Russia, Iran, Myanmar and authoritarian states that heavily censor the internet.

The pitch to tech companies was to help provide discounted or heavily subsidized server bandwidth to meet rapidly growing demand for virtual private network (VPN) applications funded by the US-backed Open Technology Fund, a the president of the organization, Laura Cunningham, told Reuters.

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

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

OTF specifically supports VPNs that are designed to work in states that restrict internet access. The US injected increased funds into OTF-backed VPNs following Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Reuters exclusively reported at the time.

Since then, the organization has received a boost to its budget from the US State Department through the 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 such as Russia, Myanmar and Iran, where internet censorship severely restricts access to outside information.

About 46 million people a month now use US-backed VPNs, Cunningham said, but added that much of the budget was taken up by the cost of hosting all 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 growing demand,” she said.

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

A Cloudflare spokesperson said the firm is working with researchers to “better document internet shutdowns and censorship.”