Mapping the maze : a study of internet shutdowns across the world

Abstract

The government regimes have frequently used internet shutdowns to curb the freedom of expression and devoice people worldwide. There could be other unintentional reasons, like power failure, device rupture, regional outages, etc. However, like before, we will mainly focus on intentional internet shutdowns. There have been quite a few shutdowns from the time of our last report in Dec 2020. This time too, the reasons stated were to curb the spreading of fake news and better control over riots and protests. We again try to correlate those events with the BGP data, but this time around, with a new and better approach and extending the study to other countries as well. We try to address the following questions: { How do various governments implement these shutdowns? { Are the same techniques implemented across all the ISPs? { Can we correlate historical shutdowns with some publicly available datasets? { Can we predict shutdowns in the future after analyzing the current trend?