When Governments Turn Off the Internet

The Lawfare Podcast

The Lawfare Institute

Military, Intelligence, International Law, Constitutional Law, Rule Of Law, Politics, International Relations, News, Government, History, Diplomacy, Terrorism, National Security, Current Events, Law, Foreign Policy

4.7 • 6.2K Ratings

🗓️ 12 May 2022

⏱️ 57 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Internet blackouts are on the rise. Since 2016, governments around the world have fully or partially shut down access to the internet almost 1000 times, according to a tally by the human rights organization Access Now. As the power of the internet grows, this tactic has only become more common as a means of political repression. Why is this and how, exactly, does a government go about turning off the internet?

This week on Arbiters of Truth, our series on the online information ecosystem, Evelyn Douek and Quinta Jurecic spoke on this topic with Peter Guest, the enterprise editor for the publication Rest of World, which covers technology outside the regions usually described as the West. He’s just published a new project with Rest of World diving deep into internet shutdowns—and the three dug into the mechanics of internet blackouts, why they’re increasing and their wide-reaching effects.

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1:02.0	And you also start to see other things.
1:10.0	There can just a longer term, longer tale of impacts on that.
1:13.0	Now you had a generation of people who were starting businesses
1:16.0	and they were online businesses and they couldn't.
1:20.0	Even if they were able to get online three or four times a week
1:24.0	when the internet was put on again, they couldn't build that
1:26.0	lives in their businesses.
1:28.0	They were leaving.
1:30.0	There was an exterst, there was a brain drain, that brain drain is still going on.
1:32.0	The kind of full spectrum disruption to the economy has been extraordinary.
1:38.0	And we see that Miradassware, I mean Kashmir is the same.
1:40.0	The digital economy is decades behind the rest of India.
1:46.0	You see it in places like Kazakhstan where the cost of the blackout was measured
1:52.0	in tens of millions and that was in a few days.
	...

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