White House Rallies Tech Giants for Censorship Evasion Support

The White House met with U.S. tech giants such as Amazon, Google, and Microsoft to push for increased digital bandwidth for government-funded internet censorship evasion tools. These tools are heavily used in authoritarian states like Russia and Iran. The aim is to subsidize server costs to support surging VPN demand.

The White House is urging major U.S. tech companies to provide more digital bandwidth for government-funded internet censorship evasion tools. Representatives from Amazon.com, Alphabet's Google, Microsoft, Cloudflare, and others met on Thursday to discuss this initiative.

The tools, which have seen increased use in states like Russia, Iran, and Myanmar, are part of the U.S.-backed Open Technology Fund's efforts. The fund's president, Laura Cunningham, emphasized that the demand for VPNs has quadrupled, driven by users in heavily censored regions. VPNs help users bypass government restrictions by routing internet traffic through external servers.

Following Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the U.S. increased funding for these VPNs. The increased budget is supported through the State Department's "Surge and Sustain Fund for Anti-Censorship Technology." However, the OTF is struggling to meet the high demand, with 46 million users monthly, mostly due to the high costs of server traffic.

Representatives of Amazon Web Services, Google, and Microsoft did not respond to requests for comment, while Cloudflare said it is working to document internet shutdowns and censorship better.

(With inputs from agencies.)