The Cost of Blocking the Internet

By first throttling and then blocking access to social media sites and news outlets in the aftermath of its invasion of Ukraine, Russia has caused the most expensive internet blockages of 2022 and 2023. This is according to tech company Top10VPN. The service puts the economic cost in the past year at $4 billion while they had cost more than $21 billion in the country between the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 and the end of that year. Since the blockages are country-wide, the large number of 113 million people affected causes the high price tag.

The estimated cost of restricting the internet puts Russia ahead of second-ranked Ethiopia, where last year religious tensions around practicing in local languages led to internet shutdowns aimed at the country's Orthodox church as the government came out in support of the new splinter synod. Almost 30 million people were affected by this at an economic cost of $1.6 billion. Myanmar comes third because of internet shutdowns suppressing dissent regionally in the Chin, Kachin, Kayah, Magway and Mandalay states as well as restricting access to social network X (formerly Twitter) since the country's last coup in 2021. Economic costs for this reached almost $1 billion last year.

Myanmar is also the country which shut down the internet for the longest time in 2023: Almost 19,000 hours. However, the long-term targeted blocks only affected around 24 million people. Putting together hours of blocks and shutdowns and people affected, India restricted the internet most last year at more than 470 billion user hours (59 million people affected for almost 8,000 hours), when the government used outages to quell civil unrest locally, mainly in Manipur state.

The suppression of human rights protest also led to widespread outages in Iran last year. Pakistan blocked internet access for four days after the arrest of former prime minister Imran Khan and also restricted social media - at a population of more than 80 million internet users catapulting the country into the list of the most costly internet shutdowns. Iraq and Algeria last year used internet blocks to combat exam cheating, but use of the practice in Iraq's Kurdistan region raised questions.