Lawfare Daily: How Internet Infrastructure Affects Digital Repression in Venezuela

[Introduction]

Esteban Carisimo: Venezuela's international connectivity remains the same as when Chávez won the election 25 years ago, but the internet has dramatically changed since then.

Eugenia Lostri: It's the Lawfare Podcast. I'm Lawfare’s fellow in Technology Policy and Law with Esteban Carisimo, a postdoctoral researcher at Northwestern University.

Esteban Carisimo: I think if the political issue doesn't get resolved, solved in some way, we will not see any change sadly. If we don't see a path to normalization in the country, we will not see that in the internet either.

Eugenia Lostri: Today we're talking about the digital repression in Venezuela after the recent elections, how the current internet infrastructure facilitates it, and what the path to recovery looks like.

[Main Podcast]

So on July 28th, Venezuela held a presidential election, which President Nicolás Maduro alleges to have won with I believe it's 51 percent of the vote.

Now, these results have been widely questioned by the U.S., by several countries in the region. And in a new report the UN says that Venezuela's national electoral authority kind of fell short of following through on some of the basic transparency and integrity measures that are required. There's a review from the Washington Post of precinct level tally sheets that kind of matches the results of independent exit polls and analysis. All of that actually gives the opposition candidate Edmundo González victory in the last elections.

So I was wondering if you could maybe get us started by walking us a little bit through the context in Venezuela ahead of the elections. Like, how would you describe the mood? Would you say that the election was perceived maybe as a fair opportunity to exercise democracy?

Esteban Carisimo: Yeah, well, this was the first time in many years in which the opposition unified behind a single platform. This was under the leadership of Maria Correa Machado, who then nominated Edmundo González Urrutia, former diplomat, to be the presidential candidate of this platform. And this was a great opportunity. This brought a lot of enthusiasm to the population and to the people outside of Venezuela, which was sadly not able to vote there. So this opened the opportunity to the opposition to win or to have a, let's say, a fair contest with the presidential candidate Maduro for his second reelection but the the results were quite disappointing.

So because all polls before the election suggested that the opposition was to win there but this didn't happen. The National Electoral Council said that Maduro won for nearly 10 points. without showing any evidence there. And the opposition says that they have evidence of the tally sheets and now those tally sheets are online. So now we don't know what is going to happen in the next days or the next month. If Maduro is going to take his third term in January or if Edmundo González is going to be the president.

Eugenia Lostri: So this hope that the opposition had ahead of the elections, just because they were consolidating behind this one platform, you know, and now the questions about lack of transparency around the results did lead to a lot of protests in Venezuela. And there's been reports of repression, both physical and digital. So can you talk through maybe the protesters demands and then the government's response and in both the physical and the digital realm?

Esteban Carisimo: Yeah. So these are very controversial results, right? What the National Electoral Council said is not what the population was expecting and what the votes are showing, or details are showing. So all of the people were really upset in Venezuela. But the protests were very peaceful, which is surprising. People, and Maria Cuneo Machado had that message to demonstrate in a peaceful way, but of course the government did not tolerate dissident. And they repressed the protests or at the beginning, they repressed the protests.

And this, the same happened in, on the internet. We've read reports from very prestigious organizations that several services have been blocked. This is not the first time this has happened in Venezuela. The same organizations reported this before, the Freedom House, the United Nations say the same, but this seems to be more severe. The government is trying to suffocate the digital protests as well.

Eugenia Lostri: So, so what does that look like? How is it more severe than in previous cases? And what does it look like in practice when, you know, your online protest is being censored?

Esteban Carisimo: Well, what is different here is because; there are many things we can talk about.

The first is the extent of the repression or the censorship in the duration and the number of services that are being blocked. In the past, we, we heard about a very isolated cases that didn't last to long. And now we're seeing that this is expanding to many services. For example, X, or Twitter, WhatsApp, and other digital communication means, which are really important for Venezuelans.

Think about this: Venezuela is a country that at its peak had 33 million people. And now approximately 25 percent of that population lives abroad. So when Twitter or WhatsApp is blocked, it's not only the protests. It's the way you have to communicate with your family that is living abroad. So Venezuelans are experiencing a very hard time with their communications being banned.

Eugenia Lostri: Now, I know that you've researched the way that authoritarian leaders can quell protests through the censorship of the internet or, you know, by disrupting it. So even if we're not speaking exclusively about the context in Venezuela, maybe can you expand a little bit more on what are the tools that you've seen being used by authoritarian regimes? What are the commonalities? Are there some, I don't know, some actions that are region or country specific that you see only in Venezuela, or is there like a common playbook here?

Esteban Carisimo: Okay, there are various methods to impose censorship on the internet. As you can say that, there are different mechanisms to block, for example, specific content or specific domains, for example, a website or specific website. Or, well the most extreme cases are the ones that disconnect users to gain access to the network.

So in recent days, we see that, for example, NetBlocks or OONI, which are very prestigious organizations reporting censorship, detected instances of censorship in Venezuela. This seems to be targeted censorship on services. As I said, Twitter, WhatsApp, I think Reddit was blocked too. Freedom House publishes an annual report called ‘Freedom of the Net,’ and they highlight the censorship in the past in Venezuela as well. So this is not new in Venezuela.

But as you said, other governments have other practices and I collaborated with colleagues on a study last year in which we reported national, nationwide government order shutdowns. This is the most extreme censorship that disconnects all users regardless of their activities on the internet. And this typically happens or this type of censorship is conducted in countries where governments do not have the technological capabilities to apply more targeted censorship. So instead of this connecting just a service, they don't have the tools to target to a specific service, for example, Twitter, WhatsApp, or digital communications. When we studied this last year, which was a study that looked to between 2018 and 2020 to 2023, we did not find any type of disconnection, government ordered disconnection or shutdowns in Venezuela. So Venezuela is apparently having the technological means to apply targeted censorship.

Eugenia Lostri: That's really interesting. And then just to, you know, make this super clear to anyone, to anyone that's listening, the real world effect of this digital censorship, you know, like you can imagine it can be harder to organize the protests. It can be harder to report on what's actually happening when there is a crackdown of the protests. But what are the maybe other effects that we're not thinking about when you have online censorship? What does that look like in the quote unquote real world?

Esteban Carisimo: Well, it depends on the type of censorship that is being applied. When the government tried to reduce the protests or to mitigate the protests, it has collateral effects. As I said, when they, they, when they apply these shutdowns, everybody gets a lot offline, for example, if you have, I don't know, a shop or a cafe, and if your business relies on the internet, as many things relies on the internet these days, it's going to be affected.

In digital communications as well, WhatsApp is a widely adopted tool, not only for, to organize a protest, it’s also for, I said, a family communication or other businesses. But when Venezuela wants to extend this, it's going to start blocking other services, which is going to have collateral damages. For example, a domain may need, may not be restricted for a single service. For example, Amazon or cloud providers are serving millions of websites. And if you'd like, if the government wants to block that, it's going to be, it's going to end up blocking many things altogether.

Eugenia Lostri: No, this that you mentioned, the capability that the government has to do targeted censorship is really interesting. And, you know, I'd like to connect this to this new paper that that you authored on the effects of the Venezuelan crisis on internet infrastructure in the country. Right. But before we dive into your findings and how this connects to everything that is going on. I would like to ask what, what were your motivations in writing this? You know, why did you think that the effects of the crisis on internet infrastructure was, you know, you needed to focus on that issue?

Esteban Carisimo: Yeah, I'm going to leave aside all my personal views and motivations here. I'm going to only use my research motivations here. The first is more my background. I studied Latin America's internet infrastructure as part of my research agenda. I started my research career studying the transformation of Bolivian-Paraguay internet infrastructures after the development of some key infrastructures in the country. This was approximately 10 years back. During the pandemic, I also published a paper which investigated the creation of internet exchange points, which are critical infrastructures that are in Latin America and in many other countries as well. These infrastructures serve for domestic data exchanges. And my study was about Latin America. What is the role and the creation of these internet exchange points in the region?

So studying Venezuela is another piece of my research agenda. But at the same time, Venezuela is quite unique. This crisis invited us to investigate the consequences of a large crisis on internet infrastructure. So not too long ago, Venezuela was a wealthy country with a thriving middle class. So this is a very unique starting point. Many countries have experienced different types of traumas, but anyone similar to Venezuela. When the crisis started, Venezuela's internet development was similar to the rest of Latin American countries. Venezuela had quote unquote good internet for Latin American standards and ten years later, we'd like to know what's going on there. So this is very unique. So, the starting point of Venezuela was middle income country with good internet. So we'd like to know what happens when the country faces a crisis of such magnitude.

Eugenia Lostri: So I was really curious and maybe this connects back to the theme of lack of transparency, right, that we were talking about before. But I'm sure that collecting the information that you needed in order to conduct this assessment about what has been happening with Venezuela's internet infrastructure in the last 10 years was not the easiest thing. So what was your methodology? How did you get around some of the challenges in acquiring that information?

Esteban Carisimo: Yeah, so the methodological part is where in the part we collected data. Actually, we did not collect it. We use publicly available datasets. But the question here is which are the right datasets to capture what happened in Venezuela during the past decade. So we need to get data from Venezuela, which is, that can give us a longitudinal view for at least 10 years of what happened there. But there are several internet data sets or internet measurements data set that can give us this perspective. And we combined, or we employed a wide ratio of publicly available data sets for this purpose.

So this is the part that I'm going to start talking about technical stuff, internet measurements. This is not trying to be a computer network class, which is the class I teach at Northwestern. And I did it before at the University of Buenos Aires. I'm not trying to give a lecture on measurement platforms, but I need to give some explanation of how we get this visibility. How can we view the problem?

And I'd like to start with an example, which is RIPE Atlas. RIPE Atlas is a measurement platform. So, let's think it's a network of computers which is globally distributed and it's administrated by the European Regional Internet Registry. So, this platform seeks volunteers willing to host a small, non-intrusive measurement device. It's like you plug a little box, the size is, I don't know, it's like a wallet, that you plug to your network or connect to your Wi-Fi. And it's going to execute non-intrusive internet measurements. And currently, RIPE administrates approximately 10,000 devices around the world, nearly in every country. So, these boxes are launching internet measurements all the time. And with this, we can construct a view of the reality of different services.

So, this is like an example, but we use many data sets. We use many data sets collected by these platforms. Another research measurement platform, which is administered by CAIDA, which is a research lab at UC San Diego. M-Lab, which is an initiative founded by Google. And other data, which is public network data reported by Meta. And with all this information we, we created, because that is the way, the way I can explain it. We created a multidimensional view of the Venezuela's internet in the past 10 years.

Eugenia Lostri: And what did you find? What were your, you know, main takeaways?

Esteban Carisimo: Well, this isn't a very extensive list of findings here but the results are, well, it's catastrophic. Venezuela's internet infrastructure has not seen any major investments or updates for at least 10 years. So let me explain a few of them. It's going to take us a very long time to explain everything, what we found there. But I'd like to show you some things that are very clear to explain what happened there.

So, for example, submarine connectivity. Submarine cable networks is one of the very first pieces we examined there. Submarine cables are key infrastructures that enable intercontinental connectivity, or in many cases, international connectivity as well. For example, we use submarine cable infrastructure when we download data from a server that is hosting a website or another resource abroad. Let's think about Venezuela. For example, a user that is fetching content that is being served from Miami. That is going to require a submarine cable. But we also use submarine cables in video calls. When participants are in different continents, it's the only option we have. We tend to think that satellites are connecting continents, but it's not typically the case. 99 percent of intercontinental communications use submarine cable infrastructure. So submarine cable infrastructures are undeniably key infrastructures. They are very expensive and they require at least a few years for planning and deployment.

So in this context, we investigated what happened in Venezuela. Was Venezuela able to keep pace of construction of this infrastructure? And sadly, the answer is no. Venezuela only planned and deployed one submarine cable since Chávez took office in 1998. One cable. But the most important part is what is, what is the nature of this cable? This cable has no impact because it only connects to Cuba. In fact, this cable was created to give Cuba access to the internet through Venezuela rather, Venezuela benefiting from it. And this highly contrasts with Latin America, which constructed nearly 40 submarine cables during the same period. So, in summary, Venezuela's international connectivity remains the same as when Chávez won the election 25 years ago, but the internet has dramatically changed since then. So, this is the first piece of the results I can show you, but we have many more results.

Eugenia Lostri: As I was reading your paper, I was, I was really struck by this comparison that you were able to draw between where Venezuela is and where the rest of the region was. I think maybe the one that struck me was the most was this speed of connectivity, the, the download speed. Because it's just, I, I cannot imagine going back to a time where you just like actually had to wait for a website to load and I, I just, I thought that was crazy. Even if just as a way for me to remember what it was like in the, in the early days of internet connectivity.

Esteban Carisimo: Well, this is even worse because we are not downloading content as, as we were doing it in 1998. Now we, our requirements are completely different and Venezuela's internet capabilities do not meet those, the current standards. So let me give you the numbers of Venezuela's bandwidth.

So we use M-Lab, which give us a speed test, a repository of at least 15 years of download speeds, and the current median download speeds in Venezuela are three megabits per second, while the regional average is above 20 milliseconds. So Venezuela is nearly 10 percent of the regional average.

But the most important part here is the evolution. Venezuela is at 3 Mbps now, but it was stagnated at 1 Mbps for more than 10 years. And in the recent years, they have a very quick growth from one to three. Well, the region is still in 20, but they, they narrowed this gap from one to three in approximately two, three years since 2020. Because CANTV.net, which is the largest provider in the country, the state-owned provider in Venezuela, started to offer high speed services. But these high speed services are unaffordable for Venezuelans because they cost 10 times the minimum wage. So Venezuela is recovering, but only a portion is benefiting from it, and it's still way behind of the rest of the region.

Eugenia Lostri: So it really does make intuitive sense that the crisis in Venezuela is the main driver of this lag in internet infrastructure, right? But, and you did mention that they were roughly in the same spot as the rest of the region 10 years ago. But how did you go about assessing and establishing this causality? Is there something more specific that you can point to?

Esteban Carisimo: Well, Latin American countries, we can say that Latin American countries have a lot of commonalities. So we expect Venezuela to share those commonalities with the rest of Latin American countries. And Venezuela did share those commonalities 20 years back, but we don't see that anymore. For example, there are many things that we can see and we can explain that Venezuela is not experiencing the same growth path or, or development as other countries.

For example, there is another thing that I wanted to mention, which is period facilities. What are peer facilities? Peer facilities are buildings where network providers put dedicated network equipment to peer with each other. Basically, network providers go and install routers, and with these routers they exchange data. So the region these days has 600 peering facilities, Latin America as a whole has 600 facilities, with Brazil having approximately 300 facilities. But other countries like Mexico and Argentina, which are large territorial countries, highly populated in the case of Mexico, has 50 each. The number in Venezuela is 4.

So out of 600, Venezuela only hosts less than 1%. And compared to Argentina, which has a similar population, it has 4 compared to 50. This is quite different. So it's impossible to see that Venezuela is going to have similar internet qualities or characteristics of other countries. But we expect it to be similar. And in terms of submarine cables, we were talking about that before. Venezuela was leading submarine cable deployments in the 90s. Probably because it's close to the United States, have a privileged location, but, well, it's not anymore.

Eugenia Lostri: That's, that's really striking. So, are we talking about a lack of investment? We're talking about an isolationist position. Is it there, but it's not affordable? What are, what are some of the causes of this delay?

Esteban Carisimo: There are many things all together happening in the country. One of the things that I wanted to share with, I think it's very, it's going to depict what happens in Venezuela is the role of Caveguías or CANTV, which is Venezuela's state-owned provider. CANTV is the largest ISP in the country, has been historically the most important provider in Venezuela. It was privatized in the 90s and re-nationalized by Chávez in 2007. So, the country is the largest and is state owned. And theoretically, and let me quote it, theoretically offers affordable services because if you would like to get that subscription, you'll never get it.

So our study investigated what happened with CANTV especially with its network connectivity during the past 25 years. And to examine CANTV’s connectivity, we examined their, CANTV's upstream providers. When you have an internet provider, it's typically connected to other providers. And what we call access providers, which are the providers we use to connect to the internet, are connected to transit providers that interconnect our residential ISPs.

So we, we track during 25 years, changes in upstream connectivity of CANTV. And one of the things we noticed is CANTV has been losing upstream providers in the past 10 years, since the crisis started. A big difference here is that U.S. based providers or U.S. based companies stop peering with CANTV, stop announcing or sending traffic to CANTV. And we don't know the root causes here, but we can speculate here. The first one is CANTV 's insolvency. The company is broken, so cannot pay in U.S. dollars upstream connectivity to send traffic to other countries. And we can think that the sanctions are going to have a negative effect. But here, the U.S. imposed sanctions, so I doubt U.S. based providers can provide any services to CANTV.

Eugenia Lostri: That's, that's a great example. Is there any other, you know, story like this or vignette that you know really struck you that that represents the like the really deep effects of the crisis on internet infrastructure that you want to share?

Esteban Carisimo: Well there are others. One of the things that we can talk is about what we call content providers or CDNs, content delivery networks. The content delivery networks are key infrastructures that serve the content we use. Every time we get to a website, the modern way to deliver the content we are consuming is through infrastructure that are specifically designed to serve this content. There are some companies that offer these services. For example, if I have a company, I don't have to serve the content to my users, I'm going to pay a third-party company. That is going to do this for me. It's like a mail service, not an email, like the post service in the United States. Somebody is going to deliver content for me. I don't have to deliver it myself.

And this company is typically the deployed infrastructure in all countries to have like logistics there. It's like having content warehouses in the country, data centers. That is the example. But when we look at Venezuela, we have different stories there. We see that some content providers deployed infrastructure within Venezuela before the crisis started. But the content providers which are more modern or technologies that did not exist before the crisis, those content providers did not deploy any infrastructure there. Why? There are many whys.

Sanctions could be a reason. The second one is they don't know what is going to happen with their infrastructure. Is it secure to place your own hardware, probably with intellectual property inside of it, in a country that you don't trust? So when those servers are not in the country, users are going to experience a worse quality of experience. Their user experience, surfing the web, watching videos or any type of content is going to be much worse.

Eugenia Lostri: So, you know, what, what can be done? You know, what would it take to get Venezuela up to speed, so to speak?

Esteban Carisimo: Well, there are many things that we can think about. I think if the political issue doesn't get resolved, solved in some way, we will not see any changes sadly. Maybe I'm wrong, but I don't think if we, if we don't see a path to normalization in the country, we will not see that in the internet either.

Eugenia Lostri: Right. I mean, we have the last 10 years to, to look at, to see how that hasn't helped.

Esteban Carisimo: Yeah. So let's suppose Venezuela, it starts a path to normalization. And I think there are some quick fixes and some other long term goals there. Quick fixes: I was saying that CANTV lost a lot of providers. The infrastructure is there. If providers were serving CANTV, I don't know, five, 10 years back, they are, they have the infrastructure to start serving CANTV again. So it's a quick fix. They need to resume their connections, their connectivity. This is, let's say, this is code. It's not infrastructure. They need to flip the switch and start serving CANTV again and I think that will help to improve international connectivity.

Another piece of infrastructure that I did not mention is DNS. DNS is like internet phone book. Let me give a quick example here. When we visit a website, for example, www.example.com, we need to transform that name into bits. The, our monitors and computer networks, adapters, they use bits instead of strings. That conversion uses a hierarchical distributed database, which is DNS. I don't want to explain the details. But in this database the best you can have is to have a closed replica or instance of that service close to you. And those servers were installed in Venezuela. So Venezuela has those servers, but they are unreachable. We don't know what's going on. The infrastructure is there, but Venezuelans not getting content from there. They're not exchanging data with those servers. So I think I can imagine that those servers are still there and running, but the only thing we need to do is to improve the connectivity there to optimize their routing to get to those servers. And if we can do that, Venezuelans will immediately get better internet.

But the last part is in investments. If the government, if we see a regime change in Venezuela and we see that the country goes to a democratization and normalization, we're going to see foreign investments or international aid to Venezuela. Venezuelans need urgent investment in submarine cable, as I said, 25 years without cables when the internet has expanded dramatically during the same period. Peer facilities, less than 1 percent of Latin American facilities are in Venezuela. That is unacceptable.

Eugenia Lostri: So you kind of hinted at this by mentioning international aid, but do you see a particular role for maybe regional support, whether through an organization like the Organization of American States or in a bilateral way?

Esteban Carisimo: Well, I think it's not only governmental entities. I think companies can help here. I think companies are going to be interested in getting back in Venezuela. As soon as the country gets better normalized. I think Venezuela is a very attractive country for investments, has a large population. It's a country that hasn't seen any investments. So I think probably I'm not in the business, but I guess that providers will be interested to get back in Venezuela. Content providers will be interested in hosting their, or having their service there to offer better services there.

I think international aid is going to help. I think governments are going to be willing to support Venezuela. This, as I said, submarine cables are very expensive to install. But they are not as expensive as many other things that Venezuela needs, and they are going to have a very quick impact on a very important one. In society, everything on these days runs or needs the internet. So I don't know. I believe that international aid, multilateral or create, create agencies or any other organization is going to be interested in funding projects in Venezuela.

Eugenia Lostri: Let's, let's dig a little bit more on that because as your paper recognizes, we've seen a lot of really good reporting on the effects of the Venezuelan crisis on health and education mortality. And I, I think your research is a really good contribution to that kind of wide picture of what does the country look like a decade after. So, given all the needs in Venezuela, if, you know, again, the hypothetical normalization of and stabilization of the political situation. What is the case for kind of immediate support for internet infrastructure?

Esteban Carisimo: I think that the most urgent here is to re, to restate, to reconnect Venezuela with its former providers. That is the quickest and easiest way to do it. I would say that we can think about emergency plans here, not the optimal internet structure that we can build for Venezuela, but the quickest to get it better. Venezuela can connect to, for example, there are some hubs close to Venezuela that could be used to get better internet. For example, Columbia. one of the things that my paper or our paper shows is that these devices that I mentioned to measure the internet, the ones that are next to the Colombian border have better, I don't, I don't want to talk about the technicalities, but let's say in one metric, we can say they have better internet than the ones that are in Caracas, which is far from the border with Colombia. So one of the things that I can imagine is what if we connect those providers in the border to Colombia? Colombia has much better infrastructure than Venezuela these days. So that is an option.

Brazil is a huge hub for the internet. Sao Paulo is, runs the largest IXP, the internet exchange point. Maybe Sao Paulo is far from Caracas, but Fortaleza is not too far. Fortaleza has become a very important hub in Latin America as well. But talking about other countries which are small countries or territories close to Venezuela but with good internet, we can talk about Curaçao, If I remember correctly, Curaçao is approximately 100 kilometers from Caracas. And they have good internet infrastructure. I don't know if it's good enough to support all 33 million or 25 million people these days in Venezuela connected to the internet, but they have good infrastructure and it's only 200 kilometers. And the same for Trinidad and Tobago, it's on the east side of Venezuela, it's further from Caracas, but it’s another option.

Eugenia Lostri: Now, I want to connect these kind of two sections of our conversation, right? We had, we talked about the protests around the election, and we also talked about the state of internet infrastructure. Now, would you say that current state of internet infrastructure eases or supports digital repression? Would you say it makes it harder, or it doesn't really have much weight at all, it would still happen in the same ways?

Esteban Carisimo: Well, it's not very clear. It's not a straightforward connection here. In the paper I mentioned before that in which we study shutdowns, government order shutdowns, one of the things we noticed, it's easier for governments that hold large state owned providers to shut down the internet. But we haven't seen any shutdown in Venezuela. If I try to make an analogy, we can say that CANTV has a major role in the country, so that could help Venezuela to apply censorship in the country. But at the end of the day, if you have a repressive government with, I don't know, with power, whatever power is in the country, they are going to be able to shut down or ban the internet in the way they want. But for sure, centralized infrastructures, as the one we see in Venezuela, the lack of alternative paths, make this simpler to conduct censorship.

Eugenia Lostri: So, Esteban, before we, we wrap up the conversation, do you have any last thoughts, any wisdom that you want to make sure that, that our listeners get?

Esteban Carisimo: Yeah, this is, this is now just personal. I hope Venezuela can find a path to normalization soon. That is my personal, my personal hope here and I'm very optimistic the country is going to recover soon. And if the country starts the path to normalization. I'm pretty sure the internet is going to one of the things that they're going to address, at the very first initiatives of the government. I think everybody knows that the internet is a key tool for modern life, for businesses, for education, for government as well. And I think, and I'm optimistic that this is going to happen soon, probably next January.

Eugenia Lostri: Here's hoping. Thank you so much for joining me today. This was, this was great.

Esteban Carisimo: Thank you.

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