Brooklings study finds government-ordered internet blackouts over past year cost $2.4B+, with India suffering biggest impact at $968M for 70 days of disruption
Bloomberg : Tweets: @gitagovinda Tweets: Patricia / @gitagovinda : 70 days of disruption in India over the last two years! And nearly $1B lost. Yet it's barely news when it happens. http://twitter.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
The Brookings study puts the first hard price tag on a practice that had been growing quietly: a watchdog had already counted shutdowns rising from 75 in 2016 to 196+ across 25 countries in 2018, and India's 70 disrupted days made it the single largest loser at $968M of the $2.4B+ global total.
What came after validates the baseline. India's losses kept compounding — $2.8B in 2020 alone, then over $4.8B across 2019–2022 — while 2023 set a record for shutdowns worldwide, with India leading at 116 of 283. The 2016 figure now reads as the floor, not the anomaly.
First-order effects
- Indian businesses and consumers absorb the direct hit: $968M in lost economic activity from 70 days of government-ordered disruption, concentrated in a single market.
- Governments ordering blackouts now face a quantified cost per shutdown day, giving businesses and advocacy groups a concrete number to cite against the practice.
Second-order effects
- Telecom operators bear the enforcement burden — India has separately ordered carriers to disable mobile data in central Delhi — absorbing revenue loss and customer friction for state-directed outages they don't choose.
- India's parallel push to attract manufacturing investment, including its chipmaking incentive program that drew Micron, sits in tension with a shutdown habit that makes connectivity unreliable — a risk factor for the foreign suppliers and contract manufacturers those incentives target.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, shutdowns shift from emergency measures to routine governance tools: the trajectory from 75 shutdowns in 2016 to 283 in 2023, and from a $2.4B annual cost to $9.01B by 2023, suggests economic damage has not deterred governments — measurement alone has not changed behavior.
- For India specifically, the cumulative cost — $968M in one year growing into multi-billion annual losses — becomes a structural drag on its manufacturing-hub ambitions, potentially forcing a reckoning between security-driven outages and the connectivity foreign investors assume.
The trend: Government internet shutdowns are escalating in both frequency and economic cost, with India as the persistent epicenter and quantified losses so far failing to change state behavior.