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Sept 5 (Reuters) - The White House, aiming to persuade U.S. tech giants to offer more digital bandwidth for government-funded internet censorship evasion tools, held a meeting with representatives of Amazon.com, Alphabet's Google, Microsoft Cloudflare and others on Thursday.
The tools have seen a surge of usage in Russia, Iran, Myanmar and authoritarian states that heavily censor the internet.
The pitch to tech companies was to help offer discounted or heavily subsidized server bandwidth to meet the fast-growing demand for virtual private network (VPN) applications funded by the U.S.-backed Open Technology Fund, the organisation's president, Laura Cunningham, told Reuters.
"Over the last few years, we have seen an explosion in demand for VPNs, largely driven by users in Russia and Iran," Cunningham said. "For a decade, we routinely supported around nine million VPN users each month, and now that number has more than quadrupled."
VPNs help users hide their identity and change their online location, often to bypass geographic restrictions on content or to evade government censorship technology, by routing internet traffic through external servers outside of that government's control.
