Documenting Kazakhstan’s Internet Throttling Tactics

Five months ago, we received conflicting reports that RFE’s Kazakh newsroom’s websites were not accessible in the country. The government and internet service providers did not make any information available on what was happening.

In collaboration with the great minds at OONI (Open Observatory of Network Interference) and the Open Technology Fund, my Kazakh colleagues and volunteers across the country set out to gather data to find out what was really happening.

Their testing of our sites showed that access to them was intentionally throttled to make sure people didn’t visit them.

This isn’t incredibly original. Other Central Asian countries, most recently Kyrgyzstan, have taken similar steps, but it’s hard to prove with certainty.

In Kazakhstan, the team has since implemented our increasingly ubiquitous censorship circumvention playbook.

Here’s the OONI report.