[kictanet] The Economic Cost of Internet Shutdowns

[Mose Karanja]

How much does it cost a country when its connection to the Internet is shut down? Turns out it is quite a lot. 

As the frequency of Internet shutdowns keep rising globally and in Africa particularly, several attempts have been made to quantify what this means economically. 

Two key reports by Brookings Institute & Deloitte/Facebook released under the Global Network Initiative (GNI) have proposed methodologies that attempt to answer this question. 

They both base their calculations on the contributions of the ICT sector to the Gross Domestic Product and using variables of duration of shutdown, population affected, and Internet connectivity, model formulas to get a rough estimate of how much a country loses in the these instances. 

Deloitte’s calculations are more nuanced on differentiated levels of connectivity and estimates that an average high-connectivity country stands to lose at least 1.9% of its daily GDP for each day all Internet services are shut down. For an average medium-level connectivity country, the loss is estimated at 1% of daily GDP, and for an average low-connectivity country, the loss is estimated at 0.4% of daily GDP. 


Beyond the dollars?
Internet shutdowns directly affect people who use its communication channels and on top of suffering economical losses and inconvenience, there is the massive impact on basic life experiences. Security, health, education, participation in the global economy and all these converge as human rights violations. 

These kind of reports are valuable tools for advocacy especially because governments (the main actors on Internet shutdowns) understand money language more than human rights. It is just a fact of life. 



Brooking’s Report is here: https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/intenet-shutdowns-v-3.pdf <https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/intenet-shutdowns-v-3.pdf> 

and Deloitte/Facebook report is here: http://globalnetworkinitiative.org/sites/default/files/The-Economic-Impact-of-Disruptions-to-Internet-Connectivity-Deloitte.pdf <http://globalnetworkinitiative.org/sites/default/files/The-Economic-Impact-of-Disruptions-to-Internet-Connectivity-Deloitte.pdf>


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Moses. 
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