When Sudan’s internet went dark in June 2019, I remember scanning my feeds for the story behind the story. A near-total shutdown occurred in the middle of a pro-democracy uprising. Protesters were being killed. The world’s attention flickered, then moved on. But something kept nagging at me: who actually benefits from a blackout like that? The obvious answer is the government doing the shutting down. The less obvious answer involves a network of corporate intermediaries, surveillance vendors, and geopolitical actors who profit from the chaos in ways that rarely make headlines.
I’ve spent the last several months mapping these profit chains across more than two dozen internet shutdowns, from Iran to Myanmar to Ethiopia to India’s Kashmir region. What I found is a political economy of disconnection that implicates far more players than any authoritarian regime acting alone. The infrastructure of a shutdown, and the aftermath of one, generates value for companies and governments that publicly condemn the practice while quietly benefiting from or enabling it.
The anatomy of a shutdown
First, the mechanics. Most people imagine an internet shutdown as a leader flipping a switch. The reality is more bureaucratic and more revealing. Governments issue orders to telecommunications companies, who then throttle or block traffic at key network exchange points. In many countries, especially across Africa and South Asia, a handful of licensed ISPs control nearly all connectivity. These companies comply because their licenses depend on it, because the legal frameworks compel them, or because the executives have relationships with the ruling class that make refusal unthinkable.
Research indicates there were at least several hundred documented internet shutdowns across dozens of countries in 2023 alone. Evidence shows that these shutdowns disproportionately target regions with ethnic minorities, active protest movements, or election disputes. The pattern is remarkably consistent: disconnection as a tool of political control, deployed precisely when public accountability matters most.
But the compliance of telecom companies is where the profit chain begins. In a recent piece tracing who owns the undersea cables that carry the vast majority of global internet traffic, We explored how the physical infrastructure of the internet reflects old colonial power lines. Shutdowns reveal the same dynamic from a different angle. The companies that own the backbone infrastructure rarely face consequences when a government orders a blackout. Their contracts are structured to insulate them from liability. The local telecom operators absorb the reputational damage, while the upstream providers, often Western-headquartered multinationals, continue collecting transit fees right up until the moment traffic stops, and resume the moment it returns.
Who actually makes money
The first-order beneficiaries are obvious: the governments using shutdowns to suppress dissent. But the second-order beneficiaries are far more interesting.
Start with the surveillance technology vendors. Companies like Sandvine, Allot Communications (Israel-based), and several Chinese equipment manufacturers provide the deep packet inspection (DPI) tools that make targeted shutdowns and throttling technically possible. A full blackout is a blunt instrument. The more sophisticated approach, which Iran demonstrated during the 2022 Mahsa Amini protests, involves selectively throttling specific platforms while keeping government-approved services running. That requires commercial-grade DPI technology, and it requires ongoing maintenance contracts, training, and updates. Every shutdown is, in a sense, a live product demo for these vendors. Each successful deployment validates their technology and makes the next sale easier.
Then there are the VPN companies. This sounds counterintuitive: VPNs are the tools people use to circumvent shutdowns. But the economics tell a different story. Every major shutdown triggers a massive spike in VPN downloads and subscriptions. During Iran’s 2022 protests, reports indicate downloads of popular VPN apps surged dramatically in the first week. Many of these VPN providers are commercial operations with freemium models designed to convert crisis users into long-term subscribers. Some are venture-backed. A few have murky ownership structures traceable to companies with ties to the very governments conducting surveillance. Research has documented how certain free VPN apps popular in authoritarian contexts route traffic through servers in China or Russia, raising serious questions about whether users escaping one surveillance apparatus are walking into another.
I want to be precise here: I am not suggesting that all VPN providers are predatory. Many are genuine tools of digital resistance. But the market dynamics are undeniable. Shutdowns create demand. Commercial VPN companies meet that demand. The cycle generates revenue that would not exist without the repression itself.
The insurance and consulting layer
There’s a less visible tier of beneficiaries that I hadn’t expected to find when I started this mapping exercise: the political risk consultants, cyber insurance underwriters, and business continuity firms that have built entire practice areas around internet disruption.
Internet monitoring organizations have done invaluable work quantifying the economic cost of shutdowns. Estimates suggest that India’s shutdown in Kashmir cost the local economy billions over the first year. Ethiopia’s shutdowns during the Tigray conflict reportedly cost hundreds of millions. These figures get cited in reports, briefings, and policy papers. But they also feed a growing industry of consultants who advise multinational corporations on how to “operate through” disruption events. The consulting fees are significant. The cyber insurance premiums are rising. And the entire ecosystem depends on shutdowns continuing to happen.
I traced one chain that was particularly revealing. A major Western consulting firm advises a telecom regulator in a country that has conducted multiple shutdowns. The same firm’s cybersecurity division sells risk assessments to foreign companies operating in that country, assessments that factor in the likelihood of future shutdowns. The firm profits on both sides of the disruption: advising the apparatus that enables the shutdown, and advising the companies that need to prepare for it. When I asked a former employee about this, they described it with startling candor as “the weather business.” You don’t need to cause the storm to sell the umbrellas. But it helps if you’re friends with the people who control the clouds.
The geopolitical dimension
The current trend context makes this impossible to ignore. As tensions around Iran escalate, with mentions of Iran and war dominating discourse alongside stock market volatility, we’re watching the real-time intersection of internet control, geopolitical conflict, and financial markets. Iran’s internet infrastructure is among the most controlled in the world, with domestic network architecture designed specifically to allow the government to disconnect the country from the global internet while maintaining domestic connectivity. The architecture itself is a product of Western sanctions and domestic authoritarian ambition working in parallel.
When Iran throttles international internet access, as it does routinely during periods of unrest, the economic disruption ripples outward. Iranian tech companies, many of which serve diaspora communities, see their valuations affected. Cryptocurrency trading patterns shift, because Iranians have increasingly used crypto to circumvent financial sanctions, and shutdowns disrupt those flows. Market analysts at major financial institutions track shutdown events as signals, not of humanitarian concern, but of geopolitical escalation that might affect oil prices, regional stability, and defense sector stocks. The shutdown itself becomes a data point in someone’s trading model.
As we wrote in an article on how the global south is being surveilled into compliance while Silicon Valley calls it development, the infrastructure of digital control is often built under the banner of progress. Internet shutdowns are the most extreme manifestation of that control, and the profit chains they generate reveal how deeply embedded these dynamics are in the global economy.
The accountability gap
What strikes me most, after months of tracing these connections, is the almost total absence of accountability at the corporate level. Governments face at least some international pressure when they shut down the internet: UN resolutions, NGO condemnation, occasional sanctions. But the companies that provide the technical tools, profit from the disruption, or structure their contracts to enable compliance with shutdown orders face virtually no consequences.
The Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, endorsed by the UN in 2011, establish that corporations have a responsibility to respect human rights, including in the context of government demands. In practice, telecom companies in shutdown-prone countries operate under regulatory frameworks that make refusal nearly impossible. And the upstream technology providers, the ones selling the DPI tools and network management systems, maintain that their products are “dual-use” and that they cannot control how customers deploy them. This is the same argument weapons manufacturers have used for decades. It works because we let it work.
A few organizations are pushing back. Access Now has called for enforceable legal frameworks that would hold companies accountable for their role in shutdowns. The Global Network Initiative, a multi-stakeholder body, has established principles for telecom companies facing government demands, though compliance is voluntary and enforcement is nonexistent. The RDR (Ranking Digital Rights) project evaluates major telecom and technology companies on their transparency around government demands, but the rankings carry no legal weight.
What I keep coming back to
I’m writing this from Singapore, a country that has its own complex relationship with internet governance and state control. I’m not writing from a position of purity. The media company I run depends on the same global internet infrastructure that enables shutdowns elsewhere. The VPN I occasionally use when traveling was probably downloaded by someone in Iran or Myanmar for reasons far more urgent than accessing a geo-restricted streaming service.
But that complicity is precisely why I think this mapping exercise matters. The conventional narrative about internet shutdowns frames them as acts of authoritarian overreach, full stop. The government is the villain. The people are the victims. The technology companies are neutral intermediaries. This framing is convenient because it locates the problem in someone else’s political system and absolves the corporate and geopolitical actors who make shutdowns technically feasible, financially rewarding, and strategically useful.
The profit map I’ve drawn is messy. It includes surveillance tech vendors in Canada and Israel, VPN companies in the United States, consulting firms in London, telecom equipment manufacturers in China, insurance underwriters in Zurich, and financial analysts in New York. It includes governments across the political spectrum, from Iran to India to Ethiopia to Russia. And it includes the structural incentive that as long as shutdowns generate value for this many actors, the political will to prevent them will remain weak.
In my earlier investigation into the infrastructure that makes upward mobility feel impossible, I described how systems perpetuate themselves by distributing just enough benefit to enough powerful actors that reform becomes structurally difficult. Internet shutdowns operate on the same logic. The harm is concentrated among the most vulnerable populations on earth: protesters, ethnic minorities, journalists, small business owners in conflict zones. The benefits are distributed across a global network of corporations and institutions with no direct stake in any particular country’s political outcome, only in the continuation of a system that generates demand for their products and services.
That’s the map. It’s uncomfortable. And the next time a country goes dark, I’d encourage you to follow the money before you follow the outrage. The outrage is justified. But without understanding who profits, we’ll keep treating shutdowns as political events rather than what they also are: economic ones, embedded in a global system that has learned to monetize disconnection.
Feature image by Viviana Ceballos on Pexels
