Starting in the summer of 2024, internet users in Pakistan experienced something mysterious. Messages to friends and family on WhatsApp, the country’s most popular social media platform, often disappeared into the ether, while users of two other applications, Signal and Instagram, reported intermittent disruptions.
The government offered vague explanations for slow internet speeds. It blamed faulty submarine cables or complications from the use of virtual private networks. Researchers soon uncovered the true cause of the breakdowns: Pakistani authorities had installed new censorship technology from a China-based firm that helps maintain that country’s vast system for controlling online information, known as the Great Firewall.
The expansion of Pakistan’s censorship regime is part of a concerning worldwide trend highlighted in Freedom on the Net 2025: An Uncertain Future for the Global Internet. The report analyzes 15 years of data on internet freedom, detailing how governments have deployed advanced and widespread measures to suppress online dissent.
Over the past year, repressive regimes have deployed new technical systems or refined existing blocking technology. Many governments advanced their ambition of achieving what they call “cyber sovereignty,” attempting to wall off a country’s domestic internet from the rest of the world.
The same Chinese firm that exported censorship equipment to Pakistan reportedly cultivated clients in Ethiopia, Kazakhstan, and Myanmar — all environments in which repressive authorities seek to curb dissent to stay in power. Cambodia issued plans for the construction of the National Internet Gateway that would centralize all internet traffic through government-controlled chokepoints.
Iran is another violator. Tehran shut down the internet during its June 2025 military conflict with Israel, leaving citizens unable to access critical information. While the Iranian authorities have engaged in such disruptions before, researchers noted that during this episode, the regime was able to maintain Iranian users’ access to government websites and other local internet infrastructure, indicating that its censorship technology had evolved.
Russia marked the report’s largest 15-year decline. Roskomnadzor, Russia’s media regulator and censorship authority, began throttling YouTube traffic in the summer of 2024, limiting access to one of the few global social media platforms that had been left unblocked by the Kremlin. Roskomnadzor also ordered the blocking of thousands of websites that employ Cloudflare’s Encrypted Client Hello, a feature that encrypts information about a user’s connection to a website and limits Russian authorities’ ability to snoop on user traffic.
Some governments deployed new methods of technical censorship. In Nicaragua, the authoritarian regime of President Daniel Ortega has carried out a multiyear crackdown on the independent media, imprisoning journalists and imposing operational restrictions on outlets that have forced most to close or flee abroad. In March 2025, the country’s domain name registrar revoked the .ni registrations of independent news websites, the first effort to carry out technical censorship recorded so far. Though the media outlets pivoted to new domain names, the restriction resulted in a downgrade of Nicaragua’s internet freedom status from Partly Free to Not Free.
Democracies are also vulnerable. In June 2024, Kenyans mobilized on social media to protest new tax policies and perceived economic mismanagement. Security forces responded with violence, killing dozens and detaining or disappearing many others. Kenyans reported an approximately seven-hour internet shutdown — the first such connectivity restriction reported in the country — that impeded their ability to communicate and express themselves amid the demonstrations.
As censorship technology grows more sophisticated and widespread, civil society has led the charge to safeguard free expression and access to information, sometimes working alongside partners in government and the private sector. In May 2025, a group of Kenyan organizations, including the Bloggers Association of Kenya and the Collaboration on International ICT Policy for East and Central Africa (CIPESA), filed a lawsuit arguing that the June 2024 internet shutdown violated Kenyan law. The judge overseeing the case issued an order to Kenya’s telecommunications providers to maintain access to the internet and social media platforms while the lawsuit proceeded — an important interim measure to protect free expression in the country.
Civil society researchers and technologists have a long track record of developing tools that protect privacy and fundamental freedoms online. Researchers at Great Firewall Report, a censorship monitoring platform, have documented how Chinese authorities and companies develop and deploy methods for restricting the internet. In a May 2025 report, they explained that some Chinese provincial governments were blocking 10 times more websites than the national-level Great Firewall. Russian dissidents have started a project called VPN Generator that creates a multitude of VPNs, each serving a few hundred users, which makes it more difficult for the Kremlin to cut off access to such anticensorship technology.
But the global community of researchers and advocates working to safeguard internet freedom faces new headwinds. The US government’s decision to dismantle its foreign aid institutions in early 2025 resulted in the termination of its support for internet freedom programming, a long-standing priority across multiple Republican and Democratic administrations. The cuts entailed the cessation of funding to experts developing anti-censorship technology and encrypted communication tools, as well as organizations that assisted journalists, activists, and others under threat for the content they posted online. Freedom House was among the organizations materially affected by the freeze in US foreign assistance, which included the removal of funding for Freedom on the Net and broader emergency-support programs for human rights defenders.
The survival of a free and open internet will require sustained commitment and collaboration by democratic governments, the private sector, and civil society, including a reimagining of the funding architecture behind the organizations and expert groups that have long galvanized global resilience in the face of online censorship.
This article is adapted from an earlier version published on the Freedom House website.
Kian Vesteinsson is a senior research analyst at Freedom House, where he leads Freedom on the Net. Before joining Freedom House, Kian was senior law and tech policy officer at Human Rights Watch.
Grant Baker is a research analyst for technology and democracy at Freedom House, where he covers Europe and Eurasia for Freedom on the Net. Prior to joining Freedom House, he worked as the Research Manager at SMEX, where he led the Beirut-based organization’s research on digital rights.
Bandwidth is CEPA’s online journal dedicated to advancing transatlantic cooperation on tech policy. All opinions expressed on Bandwidth are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
2025 CEPA Forum Tech & Security Conference
Explore the latest from the conference.
