Photographer: Dhiraj Singh / Bloomberg
Photographer: Dhiraj Singh / Bloomberg
Internet shutdowns cost India $ 2.8 billion, placing the South Asian nation at the top of a list of 21 countries that hampered citizens ’web access by 2020.
India, the second nation hardest hit by the Covid-19 pandemic in terms of confirmed infections overall, accounted for about three-quarters of the $ 4 billion lost worldwide due to the slowdown in ‘Internet. They are losses more than doubled compared to In 2019, it showed a report from a research group on privacy and digital security based in the UK.
Some countries known to limit Internet access or censor material such as China and North Korea were not included in the report because researchers relied on publicly available open source information and documented closures of the Internet and social media. .
With 8,927 hours of bandwidth access turned off or reduced, India restricted Internet use more than any other nation, as the restrictions originally imposed in 2019 continued throughout 2020, depending on the cost. global Internet outages. report published by Top10VPN.
Shutdown costs
Bandwidth restrictions in Kashmir, where the government revoked the special autonomous status of the country’s only Muslim majority state in 2019, affected access to medicines, businesses and schools despite a seven-month reduction closing in March, he said.
India’s Ministry of Information and Technology did not respond to an email seeking a response to the report’s findings.
The cost of Internet shutdowns was calculated using group indicators, including World Bank, International Telecommunication Union and the Law Center for Software Freedom, based in Delhi. Include social media closures in your calculations.
Belarus suffered the greatest economic risk after India, with $ 336.4 million lost due to 218 hours of blackouts and curbs that affected 7.9 million people, amid protests after a controversial presidential election. During the period of restrictions, the report documented a 650% increase in demand for virtual private networks in Belarus, according to the report.
Myanmar imposed shutdowns and reduced bandwidth for 5,160 hours in 2020 amid continued restrictions in the Chin and Rakhine regions, he said. Yemen lost $ 237 million to 912 hours of Internet outages.
At 27,165 hours, the top Internet outages recorded worldwide in 2020 were 49% higher than the previous year and affected 268 million people, according to the report. About 42 percent of the stalls were associated with additional human rights abuses, including restrictions on freedom of assembly, electoral interference, and violations of press freedom, he said.