Photographer: Dhiraj Singh / Bloomberg
Photographer: Dhiraj Singh / Bloomberg
The internet shutdown cost India $ 2.8 billion, putting the South Asian country at the top of a list of 21 countries that restricted citizens’ internet access by 2020.
India – the second worst hit by the Covid-19 pandemic in terms of widely confirmed infections – was responsible for about three-quarters of the $ 4 billion lost worldwide due to internet curbs. It’s losses more than doubled compared to 2019, according to a report from a UK-based digital privacy and security research group.
Some countries known to restrict 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 internet and social media outages.
With 8,927 hours of blackout or limited bandwidth access, India restricted internet use more than any other country as the restrictions originally imposed in 2019 continued into 2020, according to the Global Cost of Internet Shutdowns report released by Top10VPN.
Blackout costs
Bandwidth Restrictions in Kashmir – where the government withdrew its special autonomous status as the only Muslim-majority state in 2019 – impacted access for medicine, businesses and schools, despite the relaxation of a seven-month closure in March, it said.
India’s Ministry of Information and Technology did not respond to an email asking for a response to the report’s findings.
The costs of internet outages were calculated using indicators of groups, including the World Bank, International Telecommunication Union and the Delhi-based Software Freedom Law Center. It includes the shutdown of social media in the calculations.
Belarus suffered the most economically after India, with $ 336.4 million lost due to 218 hours of power outages and curbs affecting 7.9 million people. protests after controversial presidential elections. During the period of restrictions, the report documented a 650% increase in demand for virtual private networks in Belarus, the report said.
Myanmar imposed blackouts and reduced bandwidth for 5,160 hours by 2020 amid persistent restrictions in the Chin and Rakhine regions, it said. Yemen lost $ 237 million in 912 hours of internet outages.
At 27,165 hours, the major internet outages recorded worldwide in 2020 were 49% higher than the previous year, affecting 268 million people, the report said. About 42% of the shutdowns were associated with additional human rights violations, including restrictions on freedom of assembly, election interference and violations of press freedom.