Access Now

In the late March / early April 2016 RightsCon Silicon Valley summit at the Mission Bay Conference Center in San Francisco, Access Now convened the working group that adopted the definition of an internet shutdown that has become the field's reference formulation — "an intentional disruption of internet or electronic communications, rendering them inaccessible or effectively unusable, for a specific population or within a location, often to exert control over the flow of information". Two months later, on 8 June 2016, the same group launched the public #KeepItOn coalition with nearly 70 founding civil-society organisations from five continents, organised around the single demand that governments stop ordering internet and electronic-communications shutdowns. Ten years on, the coalition unites more than 366 national, international, regional, and local organisations across over 100 countries, anchors the field's reference dataset of documented shutdowns (the Shutdowns Tracker Optimization Project, STOP), publishes the annual #KeepItOn report that has become the standard against which UN system bodies, parliamentary inquiries, and regional human-rights courts orient their own work on the file, and is the corpus's most globally-distributed grassroots digital-rights campaign of any kind.

The 8 June 2016 launch and the founding coalition

The coalition's public launch followed two months behind the working-definition adoption at RightsCon Silicon Valley — the 8 June 2016 announcement named Access Now, the Association for Progressive Communications (APC), Bytes for All, Digital Rights Foundation Pakistan, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), Human Rights Watch, Hivos, iFreedom Uganda, Internews, Bits of Freedom, La Quadrature du Net, the Arab World Internet Institute, Digital Rights Watch Australia, and Paradigm Initiative Nigeria as the visible anchor signatories within the nearly-70-organisation founding coalition spanning five continents. Access Now's then–Senior Global Advocacy Manager Deji Olukotun framed the launch position for the founding signatories: "shutdowns harm everyone and allow human rights crackdowns to happen in the dark, with impunity", disrupting journalists, activists, ordinary citizens, and emergency services alike. The founding roster's geographic spread — Sub-Saharan Africa (iFreedom Uganda, Paradigm Initiative Nigeria), the Arab world (the Arab World Internet Institute), South Asia (Bytes for All, Digital Rights Foundation Pakistan), Western Europe (Bits of Freedom, La Quadrature du Net), North America (Access Now, EFF, Human Rights Watch, Internews, Hivos), and Oceania (Digital Rights Watch Australia) — supplied the cross-regional civil-society infrastructure on which the coalition's subsequent decade of work was built.

Coordinators and infrastructure

Access Now coordinates the coalition through a small permanent staff inside its global Policy and Advocacy line. The current named coordinators, per Access Now's own #KeepItOn FAQ, are Felicia Anthonio as #KeepItOn Campaign Manager (the coalition's principal global spokesperson and the named author cited by international media on the annual reports), Zach Rosson as #KeepItOn Data and Research Lead (responsible for the STOP tracker and the annual report's underlying dataset), and Peter Micek as Access Now General Counsel coordinating the coalition's legal-intervention work in domestic and regional courts. The campaign's infrastructure runs through Access Now's wider organisational base — the 24/7 multi-language Digital Security Helpline supplies the technical and digital-security support layer for civil-society organisations and at-risk individuals operating under shutdown conditions; the annual RightsCon summit supplies the global convening at which coalition members from across regions meet face-to-face each year; and the Access Now regional offices (Tunis, Nairobi, Delhi, Manila, San José, Berlin, Brussels, New York) supply the on-the-ground regional anchors through which the coalition's rapid-response and litigation-support work runs.

The Shutdowns Tracker Optimization Project (STOP)

The coalition's evidence-base anchor is the Shutdowns Tracker Optimization Project — a verified dataset of documented internet and electronic-communications shutdowns maintained continuously since 2016 and updated by Zach Rosson and the wider coalition. STOP is, per UNESCO's World Trends in Freedom of Expression and Media Development citation of the dataset, the field's reference shutdowns-tracking record — used by UN special rapporteurs, parliamentary inquiries, regional human-rights courts, and academic research as the standard quantitative baseline against which national-level disputes about whether a given shutdown occurred, how long it ran, and how many people it affected are now resolved. The dataset is the underlying evidence base for the coalition's annual report cycle and for each of the regional-court litigation interventions the coalition has supported.

The annual #KeepItOn report cycle

The coalition publishes an annual #KeepItOn report each spring summarising the prior year's documented shutdowns. The 2025 annual report, Rising repression meets global resistance — Internet shutdowns in 2025, was released on 31 March 2026 and recorded at least 313 shutdowns implemented in 52 countries during 2025 — the highest annual figure since the coalition began tracking in 2016, surpassing the prior record of 304 shutdowns in 55 countries in 2024. The 2025 report's findings — independently reported by Media Rights Agenda and by national newsrooms in shutdown-affected countries — were that 125 of the 313 shutdowns were conflict-related (40% of the global total, with conflict the leading trigger for the third consecutive year), that 70 shutdowns coincided with grave human-rights abuses including murder, torture, rape, and apparent war crimes and atrocities across 21 countries, that not one of the 365 days of 2025 passed without at least one shutdown active somewhere, and that Myanmar was the leading single-country offender with 95 documented shutdowns. The named developments of 2025 the report foregrounded were the International Criminal Court's recognition of the links between internet shutdowns and crimes against humanity, Bangladesh's steps toward outlawing shutdowns at the domestic level, and South Sudan's rescission of a social-media ban following coalition-coordinated civil-society pressure.

Sub-tracks

The coalition's wider work is organised under three named sub-tracks that break the shutdowns phenomenon into politically tractable sub-patterns. #KeepItOn Election Watch is the coalition's election-period rapid-response programme, monitoring the months around national elections in multiple countries each year for the deliberate shutdowns ordered during voting, ballot counting, opposition-protest, and result-announcement windows that have become a recurring pattern of incumbent governments seeking to suppress real-time mobilisation against contested results. #NoExamShutdown is the coalition's track on the shutdowns ordered by governments during national school-leaving exam periods to prevent cheating — a pattern most documented in Sub-Saharan African countries (Ethiopia, Algeria, Syria, Iraq, Uzbekistan) and contested by the coalition on the grounds that the cost to the wider population is grossly disproportionate to the stated purpose. Help #KeepItOn in Annobón is the coalition's named track on the ongoing shutdown imposed by the government of Equatorial Guinea on the Annobón Province, a 2,000-resident island community subject to a sustained communications blackout since 2024 — the coalition's first dedicated single-territory campaign sub-track under the wider coalition vehicle.

Legal interventions and the regional-court precedent base

The coalition's litigation-support work, coordinated by Access Now General Counsel Peter Micek with in-country counsel and regional civil-society partners, has built the principal body of regional-court precedent against internet shutdowns now available to litigants in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. The signature case in the African regional-court system is the ECOWAS Community Court of Justice's 25 June 2020 ruling against the Republic of Togo over the September 2017 internet shutdowns ordered during widespread protests against a constitutional amendment extending the President's term: the court held that Togo had violated Article 9 of the African Charter on Human and Peoples' Rights, awarded damages and costs to the eight applicants, and ordered Togo to take all necessary measures to guarantee non-repetition. The second ECOWAS Court intervention — the 14 July 2022 ruling against the Federal Republic of Nigeria for the 5 June 2021 nationwide ban on Twitter, brought by five Nigerian civil-society organisations and four journalists with a joint amicus brief from Access Now, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and Open Net Africa — found the ban a rights violation and ordered Nigeria to put in place a legal framework consistent with international human-rights standards. The coalition's wider litigation-support work has included interventions on shutdowns in Cameroon (the 2017–2018 Anglophone-region shutdowns), Kashmir (the 2019–2020 shutdowns following the abrogation of Article 370, in which the Indian Supreme Court's January 2020 Anuradha Bhasin v. Union of India judgment laid down the three-step test of legality, legitimacy, and proportionality that has since framed Indian high-court engagement with subsequent shutdowns), Indonesia (the 2019 West Papua and Papua shutdowns), Sudan, Sierra Leone, and Zimbabwe. The cumulative effect of the regional-court precedent base is that internet shutdowns now sit inside a recognisable category of legally-justiciable rights violation in multiple regional and domestic jurisdictions rather than being treated, as they were before 2016, as a discretionary national-security matter beyond judicial review.

Place in the make-AI-good movement

The campaign matters to the wider make-AI-good corpus on four connected counts. First, it is the corpus's most globally-distributed grassroots digital-rights coalition of any kind — a 366-organisation, 100-country coalition operating continuously since 2016, structurally distinct in geographic reach from the corpus's other coalition campaigns (the EDRi-coordinated EU AI Act fundamental-rights coalition is pan-European but EU-institutional; the Big Brother Watch UK Stop Live Facial Recognition coalition is single-jurisdiction; the PauseAI international protest cycle is federation-of-chapters; #KeepItOn is the only one of the four operating simultaneously across Sub-Saharan Africa, MENA, South and Southeast Asia, Latin America, Europe, and North America as a single coalition vehicle). Second, the coalition closes the corpus's principal internet-shutdowns track — the rights-and-technology field directly adjacent to the make-AI-good agenda on biometric-welfare-delivery shutdowns and on the digital-public-services failures that internet-shutdown periods produce. The 2023 joint No Internet Means No Work, No Pay, No Food report by Human Rights Watch and the Internet Freedom Foundation on Indian shutdowns' interaction with biometric welfare delivery is the corpus's clearest articulation of how shutdowns intersect with state AI and automated-decision-making in public-service delivery, and it sits directly downstream of the coalition's working evidence base on India as one of the world's most-shutdown jurisdictions. Third, the coalition's tactical repertoire — a small Access-Now-coordinated convening secretariat running an annual report cycle, a verified shutdowns dataset, a rapid-response Election Watch programme, a legal-intervention track building regional-court precedent, and a corporate-accountability layer on telecommunications providers — is one of the field's principal templates for sustained multi-region civil-society campaign work and has been borrowed in form by adjacent coalitions on biometric mass surveillance (Reclaim Your Face), facial recognition (Project Panoptic at the Internet Freedom Foundation), and AI Act civil-society coordination. Fourth, the coalition's founding-member roster anchors much of the corpus's existing Sub-Saharan African, Asian, and MENA civil-society organisational map — Paradigm Initiative (Nigeria), Bytes for All (Pakistan), Digital Rights Foundation Pakistan, and iFreedom Uganda all appear in the founding roster, and the coalition's Asia-Pacific reach overlaps substantially with EngageMedia's Greater Internet Freedom programme.