A suite of tools to help protect the free and open web
Last month’s Declaration for the Future of the Internet, signed by the United States, the European Union, and 32 other countries, could not have come at a more critical moment. This declaration, reaffirming the vital importance of the free, open, and global internet, comes as the assault on Ukraine and liberal democracy more broadly continues, both in Eastern Europe and around the world. These events are not separate. Just as frontlines have been drawn across much of the world, so too have they emerged in cyberspace, and the fight to protect the future of the internet is intimately bound up in the fight today to protect the future of democracy.
Jigsaw has a long history in Ukraine. Almost 10 years ago, amidst the Euromaidan protests that would eventually sweep the Yanukovitch government from power, we deployed Project Shield to protect the newspaper Ukrainian Truth. Using Google’s substantial resources as a buffer, Project Shield blunted the impact of massive distributed denial of service attacks against the paper, ensuring that access to independent information and critical voices continued.
Today, through Google Cloud, Project Shield is once again at work in Ukraine — protecting over 150 sites, including government, newspapers, and NGOs. In the last 5 years, Shield has been deployed to protect more than 2,300 sites in over 140 countries.
Protecting democracies — and with them, the future of the free and open web — will require more than protecting individual websites. To counter the threats to global freedom, last week we announced a new initiative — Protect Your Democracy.
Tools for the world’s democracies
Protect Your Democracy brings together a suite of tools to assist countries on the front lines of the fight for democracy. All the tools included — Project Shield, Outline, Intra, Perspective, and Advanced Protection — are publicly available, free, and easy to use. They were developed by the team at Jigsaw to help keep critical websites online, blunt the impact of coordinated harassment campaigns intended to silence critical voices, and help journalists and everyday citizens stay safe and connected to the free and open internet — even when governments attempt to shut down access.
The initial phase of this program will focus on countries in central and eastern Europe before rolling out to support democracy across the globe. Late last month, members of Jigsaw’s team traveled to Poland to prepare for the launch of this initiative. There, they met with government officials, members of the press, human rights activists, and others to better understand current needs, assess gaps in our existing toolset, and identify potential partners who are already leading this fight. In the months to come, conversations like these will guide us in the release of new tools and features to better protect human rights worldwide.
This effort to protect democracy is inextricably linked with Google’s mission to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. Democracy is important not only because it allows individuals to have a say in their own lives, but because it allows us to learn, to change, to address the mistakes of the past and build a better future.
Russian troops marched into Ukraine this February carrying parade uniforms, expecting little resistance from the Ukrainian people or people around the world. Instead, they’ve found a bitter fight with the citizens of one of the world’s youngest democracies, determined to preserve their freedoms. And in them, democracies around the world found a reminder of what unites us.
The future of the free and open internet and the future of democracy are fundamentally bound up together. Neither can thrive without the other. Protecting both will take all stakeholders working together to preserve access to information everywhere and the institutions that safeguard it. The challenges we now face are many and multifaceted, but together we can ensure that the overwhelming benefits of an open, connected world are not lost.
