Friday 29 Mar 2024
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KUALA LUMPUR (Sept 2): Governments worldwide have intentionally shut down the internet at least 850 times over the last decade, with a massive 90% of those shutdowns taking place over just the last five years.

According to a report by portal AccessNow and Jigsaw, a unit within Google, government-mandated internet shutdowns are a devastating issue that demands global attention.

The report documented the history of internet shutdowns over the last decade, the economic toll shutdowns take on the countries that impose them and what governments and the broader business and civil society community can do to stop what has fast become a widespread and grave human rights violation.

The report, published in Jigsaw's publication The Current, traces the recent spate of internet shutdowns back to the five-day shutdown in Egypt in 2011.

Though exact data on every shutdown that has ever happened is non-existent and smaller-scale blackouts had taken place before that, the authors wrote, "Never before had an entire country, one where more than a quarter of the population was connected to the internet, simply severed itself from the open web."

The report pointed out that while Egypt's shutdown sparked condemnation from some Western countries, the number of internet blackouts however had only expanded since then.

It highlighted that these are often timed to elections in countries around the world, costing the economies of those countries billions of dollars.

One estimate cited in the study suggested that Myanmar, which has had a string of severe shutdowns, may have lost 2.5% of its GDP as a result.

That's about "half the damage wrought by the Great Recession on the US in less than a third of the time", the authors wrote.

The report said the 2011 Egyptian shutdown and others have drawn attention to the role internet service providers play in countries where very few exist.

"In highly developed markets like the United States, where there are thousands of ISPs, the sheer size of the market provides a degree of protection. But in many countries, as in Egypt in 2011, the web can be brought to a shuddering halt with just a few phone calls," the authors wrote.

The report noted that governments were also paying attention.

A number of global groups, including the United Nations, have condemned internet shutdowns as a violation of basic human rights, it said.

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