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The internet blackouts in Iran these past months have shown how powerful regimes are in controlling the digital world.
There have been ongoing internet protests in Iran. And for the Iranian government to silence this digital commotion, they imposed content blocking, digital curfews, and internet blackouts.
To combat the disruption, Cloudflare announced, on January 20, 2023, an internet infrastructure that pursues connectivity. It gives a solution for global organisations affected by the mentioned problem.
“In 2022, Cloudflare began publishing reports that compile its internal observations about government internet blackouts and notable outages worldwide,” said WIRED in their news report.
When a section of the internet goes down, the company, which also offers digital resiliency services, notices various signs. For instance, Cloudflare can examine internet protocol requests for the domain name system or the routing protocol Border Gateway Protocol to gain insight into how a government implemented connectivity blocking during a shutdown and where in the internet backbone it took place.
Making thorough comparisons of dissimilar situations might be challenging or harmful due to the unique geopolitical backdrop and technical details of various digital disruptions. Cloudflare, on the other hand, uses its position and visibility into the global internet to observe more prominent trends and provide a sense of the scale of how prevalent internet shutdowns have grown. Cloudflare operates in over 100 countries and links with over 10,000 network providers.
David Belson, Cloudflare’s head of data insight and a longtime researcher of internet disruptions, said, “There’s an increasing use of shutdowns as a means of controlling communication.”
Business owners and organisational leaders have somehow plotted the unreliable internet connectivity in their risk map. Belson has advised that specific steps should already be defined to avoid interruption.
“The interesting thing about internet shutdowns is that we typically don’t see governments shutting down electricity or water or gas. They target the internet because they see shutting down the flow of information as a vital thing to do,” says John Graham-Cumming, Cloudflare’s chief technical officer.
“For a lot of us, the internet is an essential utility that we can’t live without. These things really do have an impact, including an economic impact.”
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