White House Meeting to Aid Circumvention of Online Censorship in Iran and Other Countries

Reuters reports on a meeting at the White House aimed at persuading major technology companies to provide tools for circumventing internet censorship in countries such as Iran and Russia. According to the agency, representatives from tech giants including Amazon, Microsoft, Cloudflare, and Alphabet, which owns Google, attended the meeting held on Thursday, September 6. The proposal discussed at this meeting involved providing more bandwidth to censorship circumvention tools funded by the U.S. government. Laura Cunningham, head of the Open Technology Fund, stated that the aim was to convince tech companies to allocate more bandwidth to VPN applications funded by this fund, using discounts or subsidies. The Open Technology Fund is a non-profit organization established in the U.S. in 2019, with the goal of supporting technologies related to internet freedom and combating censorship globally. Cunningham told Reuters, "In recent years, we have seen an increase in demand for VPNs, primarily from users in Russia and Iran." She noted that the fund supported an average of 9 million VPN users per month over the past decade, but this figure has now more than quadrupled. According to Reuters, Amazon, Google, and Microsoft have not yet responded to the agency's request for comments on this meeting, but a spokesperson for Cloudflare said that the company is collaborating with researchers to better document internet outages and censorship. VPNs, which help users keep their identity and online location hidden, are often used to bypass government internet censorship. The Open Technology Fund specifically supports VPNs designed for use in countries with restricted internet access. Reuters reported in 2022 that the U.S. allocated more funding for VPNs supported by the Open Technology Fund following Russia's military attack on Ukraine. Since then, the Open Technology Fund has been strengthened and has secured a new line item in the U.S. State Department budget through a fund established under the Biden administration to support technology against censorship. However, this entity faces numerous requests in countries like Iran, Russia, and Myanmar, where severe internet censorship is prevalent, struggling to meet them. According to Cunningham, approximately 46 million people use VPNs supported by the U.S. monthly. She also added that a significant portion of the funding has reached the private sector, which is dealing with network traffic on its servers.