IGF 2022 Town Hall #54 Help! The Kill switch is taking away my limited agency

The Internet arrived with the promise of access it provides to all individuals. Internet access has helped individuals and communities to grow by going beyond social, educational, economic and geographical barriers. It became the biggest possible public square where people who were earlier divided became united. Over time, the open and secure nature of the internet has started eroding and it has become a tool for exclusion. Meaningful access to the internet has been denied to a large population, especially in South Asian regions. Governments disrupt access by adopting various measures like shutting down the internet, bandwidth throttling, blocking access to social media etc. Marginalised communities are the most vulnerable to these measures. Internet access has given women and other marginalized communities agency and the undemocratic throttling of the Internet comes down most heavily on them. Especially, internet shutdowns, being the most extreme measure, affect women, economically and socially weaker sections and children severely as they rely on the internet for their freedom of expression, access to education, and healthcare, which they normally would not be able to access due to the sidelining they face in everyday life. Most importantly, the Internet and its tools have given them safety. The session will focus on the impact of internet shutdowns on marginalised communities. Further, it will focus on the narratives that have been sidelined to understand the impact of internet shutdowns on marginalised communities across the world. The session also aims to discuss the methodology for documenting these shutdowns and circumventing these shutdowns. there is a lot of opaqueness around the procedure related to internet shutdowns, it becomes challenging to track, record and document these shutdowns. Such documentation especially for the consequences of the less privileged is important to create resilience against such denial of access. This panel will discuss the manner in which Women and Marginalized groups can fight against shutdowns in thier everyday life and the role of civil society in enabling them to fight back in absence of state intervention.

We plan to use visual media to enable participants to connect more deeply with the issue. Hybrid sessions are quite accessible, we plan to have some speakers on-site and do a dry run to understand that maximum facilitation can happen between the onsite and offsite participants. We believe that we learn from the audience as much as we learn from each other. We will be focusing on that as well.