The US Quietly Killed the Internet's Safety Net — and 5.4 Billion People Have No Idea

The US just dismantled the world's biggest anti-censorship funding program. Five of seven global regions haven't heard a word about it.

Only the US and Europe covered the story. The Middle East, Asia-Pacific, South Asia, Africa, and Latin America? Silence. That's 5.4 billion people in the dark about a decision that directly threatens their access to the open internet.

What Actually Happened

For 20 years, the State Department and US Agency for Global Media (USAGM) ran a quiet operation. They funneled $500 million over the past decade — $94 million in 2024 alone — to small groups building tools that punch through government firewalls. Signal. Tor. Psiphon. Satellite systems that beam information into countries whose governments killed the internet entirely.

Then DOGE arrived. Career staff resigned or got fired. The main granting office issued zero dollars in 2025. The Open Technology Fund, which directs roughly half this funding, had its grant terminated and sued in federal court to get money flowing again. The Trump administration is appealing.

A former US official told The Guardian: the program "was effectively gutted."

The Scale of What's at Stake

Two billion people use OTF-supported technology every day. Anyone who opens Signal, browses through Tor, or uses a VPN to reach the open internet from behind a government firewall.

In 2025, governments imposed 212 internet shutdowns across 28 countries. 120,000 hours of disruption. 798 million people affected. $19.7 billion in economic damage — Russia alone lost $11.9 billion, Venezuela $1.91 billion, Myanmar $1.89 billion.

The tools that fight those shutdowns? Many run on the funding that just vanished.

Who Gets Hurt

The damage is already showing. A digital rights group in South Asia lost 45% of its budget. Its rapid response helpline — supporting journalists and dissidents facing digital attacks — barely survived.

In Africa, the funding crisis prompted CIPESA's Africa Digital Rights Fund to scramble $140,000 in emergency bridging grants to eleven organizations across 10 countries. That's a band-aid on a severed artery.

In Iran, the cuts threaten tools that helped protesters coordinate and smuggle videos of massacres to the outside world. Iran's January 2026 shutdown showed what happens when a government severs its population from the global web. The circumvention tools that punch through those blackouts depend on this funding.

In Myanmar, the military junta's Cybersecurity Law — enacted January 1, 2025 — lets it block websites, monitor communications, and criminalize VPN use. Groups fighting this "digital iron curtain" ran on exactly the kind of shoestring operations Internet Freedom supported.

Doug Madory, an internet infrastructure expert, told The Guardian that the makers of these tools are "often operating on a shoestring and passion. They believe in the cause. There's no fancy offices, they're working out of their apartments."

The freedom.gov Contradiction

Here's where the story turns surreal. While gutting the program that funds actual anti-censorship tools for people living under actual authoritarian regimes, the Trump administration built freedom.gov — a portal designed to help Europeans bypass EU content moderation rules.

The EU's regulations target platform responsibilities around illegal content and hate speech. Human Rights Watch called freedom.gov out directly: Europe's regulatory framework "is not an authoritarian speech regime." The administration is, in effect, defunding tools that help Iranians reach the internet during a military crackdown while building tools to help Europeans view content that EU law restricts.

The State Department also withdrew from the Freedom Online Coalition in January — a global alliance the US itself created to defend digital rights.

Former State Department official Kenneth Propp, now at the Atlantic Council, told Reuters that freedom.gov "would be perceived in Europe as a US effort to frustrate national law provisions."

Why Nobody's Talking About It

This story checks every box for global invisibility. Slow-motion policy change, not an explosion. Bureaucratic acronyms that make eyes glaze over. And the people most affected can't amplify it — activists in Myanmar apartments, digital rights groups in South Asia running on fumes, Iranian dissidents who can't access the internet to talk about losing their tools to access the internet.

The program existed to keep information flowing freely. Its destruction is itself an information black hole.

What Happens Next

OTF's lawsuit remains the last line of defense. A court ordered USAGM to disburse past-due funds and continue monthly payments, but the appeal could reverse that. Congress appropriated the money. The executive branch is trying not to spend it.

Maria Xynou of the Open Observatory of Network Interference warned: less monitoring makes network-level censorship invisible. Invisible censorship and rising authoritarianism go hand in hand.

Freedom House's 2025 report found that global internet freedom declined for the fifteenth consecutive year, with conditions worsening in 28 of 72 assessed countries. The US funding freeze terminated more than 80 percent of Freedom House's own programs.

The former US official put it plainly to The Guardian: when you challenge censorship, oppressive governments must either open their internet or go full North Korea. "But because each of those options is costly for them, they'll keep trying to censor their networks so as to have the economic benefits of the internet without the drawbacks of freedom of speech. So the fight continues."

The fight continues. But the biggest funder just left the ring.

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This story was identified by the Albis Global Attention Index — measuring which stories the world isn't seeing. Explore today's blind spots →