Access Now

On Wednesday 8 June 2016, Access Now and nearly seventy civil-society organisations from five continents publicly launched the #KeepItOn coalition against state-ordered internet shutdowns — a coordinated multi-region press announcement built on a working definition of "internet shutdown" the same group had adopted at RightsCon Silicon Valley two months earlier and on a single, well-defined demand against the governments doing the ordering. The launch named the founding signatories, framed shutdowns as a recognisable pattern of authoritarian governance whose suppression value depended on civil-society silence about them, and committed the coalition to a four-part operating model: challenging service providers and telecommunications operators to resist shutdown orders; highlighting the use of shutdowns during election periods; building consensus at the United Nations and other intergovernmental institutions that people have a basic right to access information and speak freely online; and creating a secure reporting mechanism for documenting shutdowns globally.

Context

Access Now had been founded in July 2009 as an emergency-response volunteer team of technologists during the contested June 2009 Iranian presidential election, and the originating crisis-response posture — work to help Iranians "get back online" during the regime's communications crackdown — had given it both a 24/7 multi-language digital-security helpline and a programmatic orientation toward the cross-border tactical work that national digital-rights organisations could not run alone. By 2016 the organisation had grown into a globally distributed digital-rights body with regional offices in Brussels, San José, Berlin, Tunis, Delhi, Nairobi, and Manila alongside its California base, and had begun convening RightsCon — its annual flagship summit on human rights and technology, inaugurated in Silicon Valley in 2011 — as the field's principal global meeting for civil-society, technologists, government, and platform actors.

The fifth edition of RightsCon ran from 30 March to 1 April 2016 at the Mission Bay Conference Center in San Francisco, drawing more than a thousand registered participants from over seventy countries across more than 250 sessions in ten parallel tracks. Inside that programme, Access Now convened the working group that produced the field's reference formulation of what an internet shutdown actually is — "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" — and committed the participants to standing up a broad-based public coalition behind it. The working definition has since been the definition used by UN special rapporteurs, parliamentary inquiries, and regional human-rights courts. The 8 June 2016 launch is the moment that working group's commitments became a public coalition with a name, a signed-on founding membership, and a stated operating model.

The 8 June 2016 launch

The launch was a coordinated press release rather than a physical convening — a globally-distributed civil-society announcement timed to land in a single news cycle across the multiple continents the founding signatories operated on. Access Now's own press release — the launch's primary text on the public record — named the campaign's working position, the founding-coalition roster, and the four-part operating model. The accompanying Digital Rights Watch Australia announcement carried the same framing in the Oceania region the same week.

The named founding signatories visible on the public record were Access Now, the Association for Progressive Communications, Digital Rights Foundation Pakistan, Human Rights Watch, Bytes for All, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, iFreedom Uganda, Internews, Hivos, the Arab World Internet Institute, Digital Rights Watch Australia, Bits of Freedom, La Quadrature du Net, and Paradigm Initiative Nigeria — fourteen anchor organisations within a wider founding coalition the press release described as "nearly 70 organizations from five continents". The geographic spread of those fourteen anchor signatories — Sub-Saharan Africa (iFreedom Uganda, Paradigm Initiative Nigeria), the Arab world (the Arab World Internet Institute), South Asia (Bytes for All in Pakistan, Digital Rights Foundation Pakistan), Western Europe (Bits of Freedom in the Netherlands, La Quadrature du Net in France), North America (Access Now, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Human Rights Watch, Internews, Hivos), and Oceania (Digital Rights Watch Australia) — is the structural footprint on which the coalition's subsequent decade of work was built. The Asia-Pacific dimension, partially anchored at launch on the South Asian signatories, was strengthened by the regional offices Access Now itself was operating from Delhi and Manila.

Two Access Now policy leads framed the launch position on the founders' behalf. Senior Global Advocacy Manager Deji Olukotun made the case that "shutdowns harm everyone and allow human rights crackdowns to happen in the dark, with impunity", disrupting journalists, activists, ordinary citizens, and emergency services alike. Global Policy and Legal Counsel Peter Micek paired the rights frame with the economic one: "growth and human rights rise in tandem when networks remain open and stable". The four-part operating model declared at launch — challenging service providers and telecommunications operators to resist shutdown orders; highlighting election-period shutdowns; building UN and intergovernmental consensus; and creating a secure reporting mechanism for documenting shutdowns globally — became the template for the coalition's subsequent tactical repertoire of grassroots advocacy, direct policy-maker engagement, technical support, corporate accountability, and legal intervention. The reporting-mechanism commitment in particular became the Shutdowns Tracker Optimization Project (STOP), now the field's reference dataset of documented internet shutdowns.

Significance

The 8 June 2016 launch is the corpus's first Event whose primary purpose is the public launch of a multi-region civil-society coalition operating simultaneously across Sub-Saharan Africa, MENA, South Asia, Asia-Pacific, Europe, North America, and Oceania — structurally distinct from both the single-jurisdiction coalition launches the corpus already covers (the UK Stop Live Facial Recognition coalition's 6 October 2023 joint statement) and from the regional-coalition launches the corpus has begun anchoring (the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots' 22-23 April 2013 London launch was internationally aimed but staged in a single London venue with a coalition then sized at nine ad hoc leadership organisations). The launch is also the corpus's first Event anchored on the internet-shutdowns track — closing the internet-shutdowns events anchor entirely (previously zero despite the campaign's central place in the corpus) and the global multi-region civil-society coalition launch sub-shape (zero), and standing in for the founding moment of the corpus's most globally-distributed grassroots digital-rights coalition of any kind.

Within the campaign's own arc, the 8 June 2016 launch is the structural founding event — the moment the working definition adopted at RightsCon Silicon Valley two months earlier became a public coalition with a roster, a press release, a working set of spokespeople, and a four-part operating model. The coalition's subsequent decade of growth — from nearly 70 founding organisations at launch to more than 366 across over 100 countries, the regional-court precedent base built through ECOWAS Court of Justice rulings against Togo (2020) and Nigeria (2022) and through interventions in Cameroon, Kashmir, Indonesia, Sudan, Sierra Leone, and Zimbabwe, the annual #KeepItOn report cycle anchored on the STOP dataset, the named sub-tracks (#KeepItOn Election Watch, #NoExamShutdown, Help #KeepItOn in Annobón), and the coalition's 2025 annual report recording at least 313 shutdowns implemented in 52 countries during 2025 (the highest annual figure since the coalition began tracking) — sits downstream of the founding commitments made on 8 June 2016. The launch's working theory of change, that documentation, attribution, and coordinated international response can raise the political cost of ordering shutdowns enough to deter them, has remained the coalition's underlying organising principle since.