Have you tried turning the internet on and off again?

The Iranian government has been repeatedly shutting down the internet since September 19 in an effort to control the antigovernment protests. As crazy as it seems, it’s not the first time such a restriction of internet connectivity happens. In fact, it has become quite a common practice for authoritarian regimes to limit internet access to counter a protest or a potential one. Last February, during the military coup in Myanmar, a decrease in local internet connectivity has been reported by many global internet traffic monitor. When the citizens citizens took to the streets to protest the military’s power grab, the internet went dark again in Myanmar from morning of February 6 til the afternoon of February 7. In my personal experience, when the U.S House Speaker Nancy Pelosi made her controversial visit to Taiwan earlier this year, as her plane was landing, Weibo (the Chinese version of twitter) briefly crashed for half an hour. However, some users have reported that during that half-hour of outage, the website was still accessible through a VPN. This gave rise to the theory that the outage may actually be a temporary block by the government to control the online discussion of Pelosi’s visit.

It is truly scary how the access to the internet can be easily controlled. With the rise of social media in the last 20 years, we have become dependent on the internet for information and communication. However, the access to the internet in each region is provided by centralized Internet service providers (ISPs). To block people’s Internet access, dictators can simply go to the ISPs in their countries and demand it to stop its operation. If some critical operations like stock trading requires good connectivity making it impossible to completely disconnect the country, with enough computational resources, many technologies can be implemented to block only the websites people are using for communication or organization of their protests.

Over the years, many solutions have been proposed to solve this vulnerability in internet access. However, none of them seem to solve the problem completely. To counter the government’s block on several western websites, people in China has been using VPN, a technology to access internet as if you are in a different country. It may seem that VPN has brought freedom to use the internet back to people in China, but the truth is most VPN users are still dependent on VPN providers who are able to access their users’ data and are not trustworthy most of the times. Some of the VPN providers may even be set up by the Chinese government itself. Another potential solution is starlink. This is a service operated by spaceX that provide internet access through satellites so even if the internet connection is broken by ISPs, if the starlink satellites is still in space, the internet is still accessible through them. However, the starlink’s speed tend to be slow and their satellites definitely cannot support a whole country of people. Also, to use starlink, a receiver antenna must be installed which cost $600, a not so accessible price for many. Lastly, starlink is under spaceX owned by Elon Musk, which means it is still a centralized system and we still need to trust Elon Musk to not work with the entity that is shutting down the internet.

The internet is a paradox. It is a force of decentralization as it allows fast and easy spread of information among people. It is also a force of centralization as it is controlled by governments and tech-monopolies. I doubt access to internet will ever be free from a centralized entity. The attempt at decentralizing finical system using crypto-currencies and how people still end up trading with centralized coin exchange is a good lesson on how difficult decentralization is. However, I still hope someday full internet access can be guaranteed for everyone, or at least a bit closer to that goal.

Send comments to my email at: linghanz@usc.edu