Governments around the world have been increasingly pulling the plug on Internet and social media services lately. Whether it’s stopping the spread of social unrest, disrupting the flow of information at election times, or preventing cheating during national exams, closures have a wider impact.
In June alone, Iraq, Algeria and Syria imposed a series of exam-related breaks totaling 52, 50 and 6 hours respectively. In the same month, Senegalese people were barred from accessing social media platforms other than using a VPN service for over a week amid political riots. The impact of the closures not only erodes human rights, but also costs billions to economies.
That’s why the digital advocacy group the Internet Society has just launched a new tool to track the impact of internet outages. NetLoss promises to deliver “an unprecedented level of rigor and precision” that goes beyond a simple valuation.
A global increase in internet outages
“Any Internet outage, no matter how long, has a negative effect on the economy. Internet outages disrupt productivity, impede e-commerce, generate monetary losses in urgent transactions, and increase unemployment,” Susannah Gray, Director of Communications at the Internet Society, he told TechRadar.
Small and medium-sized businesses are the hardest hit, especially those that rely on digital connectivity to function fully. This further worsens the impact of the events leading up to the closure.
In July of last year, internet outages caused a record $10 billion loss to the global economy. Outages in Sudan in April cost the country more than $3 million and 560 jobs, Pakistan lost $13 million in May, and when Guinea shut down internet access amid anti-government protests, more than $500 million was lost and many jobs were cut.
As governments around the world increasingly tighten their grip on the online world, experts at the Internet Society believe measuring the true costs of these decisions could help dissuade authorities from enforcing these practices in the first place.
Gray said, “By estimating the cost of an Internet shutdown, policy makers can see the devastating impact such outages have on their country’s economy and choose alternative courses of action.”
NetLoss more than an internet shutdown cost calculator
NetLoss is the Internet Society’s new tool for estimating the impact of internet outages on economies. It does this through a variety of different assessments that go beyond traditional measures of economic output.
In addition to calculating the amount of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) lost during a shutdown, it tracks changes in unemployment levels and losses up to the amount of Foreign Direct Investment (FDI). It also provides an estimate of the likelihood that a country will experience further closures in the future.
The data used for its econometric methodology is publicly available for anyone to read and use. NetLoss tries to distinguish itself from similar existing tools by being completely transparent.
“By understanding the devastating effect of such disruptions on a country’s economy, we hope to encourage policy makers to choose alternative courses of action. We also want to provide a tool that citizens can use to support stable connectivity in their country,” Gray said.
Gray explained that NetLoss began as yet another way to support the Internet Society’s work on advocacy for the open web that began with its Pulse platform. Launched in 2020, Pulse includes an internet outage tracker that logs past and ongoing government-enforced outages around the world and an up-to-date blog.
“With the launch of the NetLoss calculator, we’re also now able to add estimated financial impact to our incident pages to give everyone a more robust overview of each crash event and the impact it has,” he said.
“By understanding the devastating effect of such disruptions on a country’s economy, we hope to encourage policy makers to choose alternative courses of action. We also want to provide a tool that citizens can use to support stable connectivity in their country.”
Closing the internet is never a solution
Meanwhile, people living in areas affected by these practices can use a circumvention tool to bypass internet restrictions. A virtual private network (VPN) is security software that spoofs the location of a users IP address and encrypts data leaving a device.
Since even governments that shut down the internet are notorious for cracking down on the use of VPNs, we recommend downloading multiple services so you can switch between them in case they get blocked.
Check out our best free VPNs page to pick the safest freebie out there. We also suggest that you consider using a Tor browser for added security and lesser-known anti-censorship apps like Lantern and Snowstorm. It is worth remembering, however, that these tools cannot help in the event of a total Internet blackout.
Speaking about NetLoss, Andrew Sullivan, President and CEO of the Internet Society, said: “Its innovative and fully transparent methodology will help show governments around the world that shutting down the Internet is never a solution.”
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