Russia's economy already lost $860 million this year because the government keeps shutting down the internet

Russia has already spent hundreds of millions of dollars on censorship this year.

It has been costly for governments around the world to shut down the internet and block individual social media outlets according to a new report. Russia has lost almost one billion dollars through deliberate outages since January. It is more than double the losses incurred by the second biggest censor.

NetBlocks, the watchdog group that calculates the damages, told Insider that the figure comes from both the direct and indirect impacts. The cost is how much a country could lose from internet and social media restrictions, including lost work productivity, investment potential, and opportunity costs, both directly to the digital sector and to digital- dependent sectors.

That is a big price tag for a country that is losing money. The Russian government was hit with costly sanctions by many western countries after its invasion of Ukraine. The country is already hurting economically, the ruble is tanking, and economists estimate that the country will hit a recession by this summer.

This kind of disruption is internet censorship in its most extreme form.

Even with its unparalleled investment in creating an iron curtain around its internet meant to cut citizens off from international or independent news, the Russian web was still relatively free in comparison to that of online strongarms like Iran and China. The Washington Post reported last month that Russia's Internet was integrated into the larger online world, and citizens had outlets to organize and seek out alternative sources of news while Putin controlled the country's free newspapers and broadcast stations.

Russia has blocked access to social media sites since the invasion of Ukraine. Major Ukrainian outlets, as well as Voice of America, the BBC, and CNN, were not allowed by the government.

The country has been sanctioning itself with these restrictions.

The price of keeping citizens in the dark 

At the end of last year, Russia lost less than $1 million shutting down the internet, but now it is trying to take away a free internet from its citizens. Russia is on track to beat Myamar's total for all of 2021, which was the most missing cash in the country last year.

Since the start of the war, demand for virtual private network services in the country has skyrocketed, with Russians trying to find their way around the blockade. In the first week of the Ukraine War, the five most popular VPNs in Apple and Google were downloaded over 2 million times in Russia.

The dark web is a hidden collection of internet websites. The shift to dark web-accessible versions of social media is starting to be embraced by some.

It is a move that might be vital to keeping ordinary Russians informed, as the Kremlin actively invests in censorship and misinformation.

Natalia Krapiva, the tech-legal counsel at the non-profit, said that platforms vastly restricting their services could hurt regular Russians, as well as Ukrainians who are in occupied territories who can only access the Russian internet.

Krapiva said that some of the actions are isolating and disconnecting people who are in fact opposing the war.