2023-bischof-destination
findings extracted from this paper
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Across all years of the KIO dataset (2016–2021), a large majority of events involved full-network shutdowns and their count grew significantly from 2016 to 2019 with no significant decline observed through 2021. Censors are also increasingly employing app-specific bans and throttling alongside full shutdowns, with all three restriction categories non-mutually exclusive and rising over the period.
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Using merged IODA and KIO data across 155 countries (Jan 2018–Aug 2021), elections increase the daily probability of an Internet shutdown by a factor of 16, coups by a factor of roughly 300, and protests by a factor of 9. These political mobilization events do not increase the probability of spontaneous outages, providing a discriminating signal between intentional and unintentional disruptions.
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The merged KIO-IODA dataset (Jan 2018–Aug 2021) documents 219 national-scale Internet shutdowns across 35 countries and 714 spontaneous outages across 150 countries; the 35 shutdown-affected countries collectively represent more than 1 billion estimated Internet users. Myanmar (53 IODA events), Syria (52), and Iraq (38) are the most frequently affected countries in the shutdown dataset.
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Countries where state-owned providers originate more than 50% of domestic address space show significantly higher shutdown prevalence; this state-ownership factor predicts shutdowns but shows no discernible difference for spontaneous outages. Countries with shutdowns have a median V-Dem liberal democracy score of 0.151 (maximum 0.481), compared to 0.279 for countries with spontaneous outages and 0.465 for countries with neither.
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Over 55% of government-ordered shutdowns last a multiple of 30 minutes (vs. 15% of spontaneous outages), and 45% last precisely 4.5, 5.5, 8, or 10 hours (vs. <1% of spontaneous outages). The median recurrence interval between successive shutdown events within the same country is 1 day versus 39 days for spontaneous outages, with 67.7% of shutdowns falling exactly on 1-, 2-, 3-, or 4-day intervals versus 0.17% of outages.