*

White House seeks discounted server bandwidth from tech

giants

to support VPNs

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VPN demand in Russia and Iran has quadrupled in recent

years

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Washington-based OTF struggles to meet demand despite

increased

funding from US State Department

By James Pearson

Sept 5 (Reuters) - The White House, aiming to persuade

U.S. tech giants to offer more digital bandwidth for

government-funded internet censorship evasion tools, held a

meeting with representatives of Amazon.com ( AMZN ), Alphabet's

Google, Microsoft ( MSFT ), Cloudflare ( NET ) and

others on Thursday.

The tools have seen a surge of usage in Russia, Iran,

Myanmar and authoritarian states that heavily censor the

internet.

The pitch to tech companies was to help offer discounted or

heavily subsidized server bandwidth to meet the fast-growing

demand for virtual private network (VPN) applications funded by

the U.S.-backed Open Technology Fund, the organisation's

president, Laura Cunningham, told Reuters.

"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 of that government's

control.

The OTF specifically backs VPNs that are 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, Reuters exclusively

reported at the time.

The organisation has since received a boost to its budget

from the U.S. State Department via its "Surge and Sustain Fund

for Anti-Censorship Technology", an initiative created at the

Biden administration's Summit for Democracy.

But 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 said, but added that a sizeable chunk of the budget

was taken up by the cost of hosting all that 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

said.

Representatives of Amazon Web Services, Google, and

Microsoft ( MSFT ) did not immediately respond to a request from Reuters

for comment.

A Cloudflare ( NET ) spokesperson said the firm was working with

researchers to "better document internet shutdowns and

censorship."