Two-thirds of the world’s population—nearly 5.5 billion people—live in a country where the global internet is censored.
And this number is only increasing as authoritarian governments around the world are harnessing technological advances to increase the scale, scope, and efficiency of digital repression.
As a result, we see increasingly sophisticated challenges to protect internet freedom, and see evolving community needs:
- the constant evolution of repressive censorship and surveillance tactics
- growing demand for anti-censorship tools
- secure, privacy-enhancing technology to counter surveillance
- shutdown-resilient tools that help people stay connected
- rapid digital security support for at-risk communities
- under-funding and under-support for the FOSS ecosystem
We fund technical solutions to address these and more.
Do you have a project that fits within the following areas?
- Applied research to better understand where and how censorship is occurring, and the technical methods to combat it
- Development & deployment of anti-censorship and privacy-enhancing technologies
- Emergency, short-term digital security support for human rights defenders, journalists, and civil society groups
- Long-term maintenance of established, free, and open source software projects underpinning the open, global internet
- Sustaining large-scale, open source, anti-censorship tools operating in highly repressive contexts
- Systemic improvements to the digital security ecosystem
- Technology-focused convenings that empower internet freedom communities to collaborate and share knowledge
Check out the funding options below to learn more.
Our Applicant Guidebook can help you with the application process.