Cutting or blocking the internet partially or completely has become a tool that seems to be very close to authoritarian regimes.
The Cuban crisis in recent weeks, where for the first time in years there have been the first visible protests against the Castro regime, has been the last case. But the assiduity of these control mechanisms has not stopped growing in the last decade.
In the case of Cuba, the blocks have been produced randomly, changing over social networks , specific information websites and applications such as WhatsApps from user to user. According to the Cuban journalist and activist Yoani Sánchez recently wrote for the Rest of World information platform, the recent blockades from the Communist Party, clumsy in many cases, show that the Internet has long won their game, with a large part of the Cuban population already informed about how, despite the very high price of a connection on the island, using a VPN can bypass most of the blockades of the Miguel Díaz Canel government. In other words, it is not as restrictive and certainly not as technically advanced as the Great Firewall of China.
Internet in Cuba, a history of less than ten years
Despite the high costs of using the Internet, still prohibitive for most of the population, Cubans found ways to take a look at the World Wide Web. After that, it became much more difficult to narrow the Internet down to a few select government-affiliated sites and apps. Unlike China, where Communist Party leaders rushed to create a sterilized and monitored network, it took too long for the old Castroists of Cuba to realize the new enemy attacking them.
Yoani Sánchez CubitaNOW And that in Cuba, a country that only had access to the network since 2012 and mobile internet since 2018, controlling internet access seems quite simple. There is only one submarine cable that connects the island with the rest of the world, and its traffic is controlled by the only state telecommunications operator, ETECSA, which offers the accounts to connect and can monitor all connections if HTTPS is not used and therefore not be encrypted.
The government also owns ground stations capable of communicating with satellites that transmit the internet. However, as revealed by NetBlocks data, it seems that the Cuban government has not opted for a severe blockade, but rather an itinerant one, probably to avoid evidence, and communications have continued to leave the island.
More than 150 countries cut the internet for different reasons in 2020
The example of internet censorship and cutting Cuba is close to Spain and Latin America for obvious reasons, but its case is only one of between 200 and 150 that have occurred worldwide annually since 2018 , according to the Keep it on report by the Access Now organization.
The year 2021 began with Uganda ordering the shutdown of the internet during a presidential election, the Myanmar military using the shutdowns in an attempted coup, and India – the country with the most outages by far thanks to legislation that allows – taking advantage of blackouts to crush farmers' protests nationwide.
In total, in 2020 there were 155 cuts in 29 countries, less than the 213 in 2019. India was the government that executed this resource by far the most
“The people most affected by the closures in 2020 were those who were already facing repression, silencing and marginalization” , they point out from the organization. “Among them are Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar and Bangladesh – where Facebook was accused of failing to take action – Belarusians fighting for their democracy, and Ethiopians, Yemenis and Kashmiris caught in the crossfire of communal violence and armed conflict. active ”, they explain in the report.
In total, in 2020 there were 155 cuts in 29 countries, down from 213 in 2019. India was the government that implemented this resource by far the most, but the increase in Africa and the Middle East was very notable.
Countries that cut the internet in 2020, via Access Now Globally, Access Now reports not only an increase in internet outages, but also a “trend towards sustained and prolonged outages,” with 35 incidents of internet outages lasting more than seven days last year. Chad, Ethiopia, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Eritrea, Mauritania, Sudan and Zimbabwe are among the 19 countries that totally or partially closed Internet access for more than seven days. Chad's shutdown lasted by far the longest, as social media apps were blocked for a record 16 months starting in 2018.
Why and how a government decides to block the Internet
The germ of blocking the Internet has its origin, unless it is known, in the Arab Spring of 2011 in Egypt. Later they would become a recurrent thing in the armed conflicts in Syria, Myanmar and Uganda.
As explained by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an organization dedicated to promoting freedom on the web, the total cuts actually represent a clumsy movement and the worst scenario for any regime: In addition to disturbing the protesters, they also disrupt the economy and make it difficult to function. of the government itself.
In fact, it is much more technically complicated to cut some URLs and specific applications, as China has done for years, and more Machiavellian efficiency.
The EFF report states that there are several methods used to block content on the internet. Government agents can block or manipulate domain names, filter and block specific keywords, block a specific IP address or urge providers to remove content or search results, similar to how It happens in Spain with the contents with copyright infringements.
The case of the Internet blocking in China The case of China is the best known, although it is not possible to speak in its case of blocking the Internet, but of a much more porous and, as we said, effective censorship. Although it is not public, it is believed that they use a combination of techniques, generally blocking some keywords , foreign websites such as Facebook and urging companies such as Google to remove certain content.
Others, like Morocco and Egypt, are currently taking a finer approach than a few years ago, according to the EFF, by filtering out a certain selection of URLs. The level of transparency in content blocking also differs from country to country. Some offer block pages that explain to users that a site is blocked (as well as why sometimes), while others redirect the user to an error page. For example, the case of Tunisia is known, where before the fall of the Ben Ali regime, users were redirected to a 404 error page.
