Growing With The People: Insights from Outline VPN Providers
The circumvention technology space is riddled with complexity due to the social realities of authoritarian countries and the ever-changing technical capabilities of governments to block the internet. As censors evolve, circumvention experts and VPN providers must also evolve.
Over the course of 2023, Jigsaw, a unit within Google that builds technology to address threats to open societies, partnered with Okthanks to conduct an exploratory research. The research sought to inform the future roadmap of Outline by understanding how VPN providers had leveraged Outline technology to create VPN services reaching up to 500k users.
The insights in this research shed light on the social challenges and technical hurdles encountered by both the people using VPNs and those providing them. Seeing how VPN providers have adapted the Outline technology and their services provides key lessons about what has worked and where challenges remain.
The recommendations in this report inform the future development of Outline. They also provide understanding on how VPNs need to respond and evolve at this moment in time of internet censorship. This report focuses on the findings most relevant to the broader censorship circumvention community and covers three aspects of internet censorship and circumvention:
Social: The Lived Experience in Censored Environments
Technological: Outline Technology in Censored Environments
Operational: The Needs of Large Scale Providers
Growing With The People: Insights from Outline VPN Providers Operating in an Evolving Censorship Landscape. (30-45 min read)
Acknowledgements:
We’d like to extend a special thanks to the research participants, including Okno, Izumo, WEPN, Paper VPN and our anonymous contributors.
Research team: José Gutiérrez, Carrie Winfrey, Emily Saltz, and David Ho
Report contributors: A special thanks to contributors from the Jigsaw team including Maddy Hoffman, Vinicius Fortuna, Peter Wiegand and Simon Biddle-Snead.