By James Pearson

(Reuters) – The White House convened a meeting with representatives of Amazon.com (NASDAQ:AMZN), Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOGL)’s Google, Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT), Cloudflare (NYSE:NET), and civil society activists on Thursday to encourage U.S. tech giants to offer more digital bandwidth for government-funded internet censorship evasion tools.

The tools, supported by the U.S.-backed Open Technology Fund (OTF), have seen a surge in usage in Russia, Iran, Myanmar, and authoritarian states that heavily censor the internet.

OTF’s pitch to tech companies at the meeting was to help provide discounted or subsidized server bandwidth to meet the fast-growing demand for virtual private network (VPN) applications supported by OTF, as stated by the organisation’s president, Laura Cunningham.

“Over the last few years, we have seen an explosion in demand for VPNs, largely driven by users in Russia and Iran,” Cunningham said. “For a decade, we routinely supported around nine million VPN users each month, and now that number has more than quadrupled.”

VPNs help users hide their identity and change their online location, often to bypass geographic restrictions on content or to evade government censorship technology by routing internet traffic through external servers outside government control.

The OTF specifically backs VPNs designed to work in states that restrict access to the internet. The U.S. injected increased funding into VPNs supported by the OTF following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, as initially reported by Reuters.

The organisation has since received a boost to its budget from the U.S. State Department via the “Surge and Sustain Fund for Anti-Censorship Technology”, an initiative created at the Biden administration’s Summit for Democracy.

However, it has struggled to meet increased demand in countries like Russia, Myanmar, and Iran, where internet censorship heavily restricts access to outside information.

Around 46 million people a month now use U.S.-backed VPNs, Cunningham noted, but added that a sizeable chunk of the budget was consumed by hosting the network traffic on private sector servers.

“We want to support these additional users, but we don’t have the resources to keep up with this surging demand,” she stated.

Representatives from Amazon Web Services, Google, and Microsoft did not immediately respond to a request from Reuters for comment.

A Cloudflare spokesperson said the firm was working with researchers to “better document internet shutdowns and censorship.”

(This story has been refiled to clarify that the pitch at the meeting came from OTF, in paragraph 3)