“The hope is that a government would be less likely to order an internet blackout if it knew the negative impacts of such a decision in terms of hard dollar figures,” he said.īut developing those estimates is an inexact science. Madory said the approach is a valuable one. “I thought this would be a substantial contribution to people’s understanding because it shows how countries are shooting their economies in the foot through shutdowns,” he said. He said he was drawn to the question because no one had attempted to calculate the damage in monetary terms before-and because it might attract renewed attention to the issue. I asked West why he focused on the economic harm of internet blackouts, when they bring also about so many other ill effects. He cited scheduled interruptions during exams in Iraq and Syria partial blackouts in politically unstable parts of Venezuela, Ethiopia, and Kashmir and occasional targeted bans on social media platforms in countries like Pakistan, Turkey, and Brazil. “National blackouts these days seem fairly unremarkable due to the prevalence as of late,” says Doug Madory, the director of internet analysis at Dyn, a company that monitors and reports on problems with the global internet. Since then, the problem has only gotten worse. The study found that the number of interferences began climbing rapidly in the mid-2000s, peaking at 111 in 2010, the last year the researchers examined. To show the increasing frequency of blackouts, West cites a 2011 study from a trio of researchers at the University of Washington that tracked the number of times a government “interfered” with the internet in its country. The bill for Saudi Arabia’s blackouts came to $465 million, Morocco’s was $320 million, and Iraq’s amounted to $209 million. The country most economically harmed by its own internet shutdowns was India-by a long shot-which lost out on nearly $1 billion in GDP, according to West’s calculations. Based on the reduction in economic activity during the shutdowns, he estimated that they cost a minimum of $2.4 billion in GDP, globally. In the report, Darrell West, the director of the think tank’s Center for Technology Innovation, examines the economic effects of 81 internet shutdowns that took place in the span of a year, between summer 20. But it’s difficult to ignore the side effects detailed in a new report from Brookings, which studies the widespread damage even a short hiccup in connectivity can deal to a country’s economy. The type of government that’s willing to darken the internet for hours or even days on end may not be particularly moved by the free-speech or human-rights implications of a blackout. If a country’s already experiencing unrest, it can give cover to serious human-rights abuses. It can make it difficult to request emergency services. It prevents citizens connecting with the rest of the world. And when governments choose to shut off the internet-if not to prevent cheating, then to stifle political protests, as in Egypt in 2011 or in Gabon just this month, or ostensibly to fight terrorism, as in Iraq in 2014-the downtime can have far-ranging consequences. Intentional, government-instigated internet blackouts are becoming more and more common. The country has made a habit of interrupting internet access nationwide during the exams: I wrote about another episode in detail earlier this year. The scheduled blackouts coincided with the third round of national placement exams for sixth graders in Iraq the blackouts are intended to keep students from cheating. These instructions were issued to every internet service provider.” “On instructions from the Ministry of Communications, internet access will be cut off every day between October 1 and 8, from 6 to 9 a.m. “Dear subscriber,” the message read in Arabic. Last weekend, cellphones across Iraq lit up with the same text message.
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