What ending a campaign does not fix
The 2020 letter closed once its immediate ask was met: OTF's independent structure was preserved and the grant pipeline resumed. Campaigns end. The conditions that make them necessary rarely do. Circumvention tools, encryption, and independent grantmaking are all still under pressure. The pressure just comes from different places at different times, which is why a follow-up piece like this exists at all.
Our background post covers what the 2020 campaign was and how it ended. This page is about what did not end.
New pressure from authoritarian governments
Governments with the most restrictive filtering keep investing in it. China has moved from static blocking of well-known sites to real-time throttling of new protocols. Iran runs deliberate internet shutdowns during protests, sometimes lasting days. Russia has tightened its grip on domestic hosting and its ability to slow specific services without a full block. Belarus, Turkmenistan, and North Korea sit further along the same spectrum.
Some of the newer moves are subtle. Domestic app stores are pushed to drop specific tools. Sanctions on hardware are used as an excuse to force users onto local platforms that are easier to monitor. Cross-border payment restrictions make it harder for a small foreign tool provider to accept fees from users inside the country. None of that shows up on a shutdown map, but all of it shapes what users can actually reach.
Each of those shifts creates new work for the tool builders. Every time a censor learns to identify a certain protocol on the wire, someone has to design a new one. Every time a shutdown lasts longer than it used to, a rapid-response team has to find another route.
Encryption on the ballot in democracies
Democracies are running their own experiments. The US EARN IT Act keeps coming back in different forms. The UK's Online Safety Act carries clauses that would, in effect, require providers to scan the content of end-to-end encrypted messages. The EU's chat-control proposals do the same. In each case, the fight is not about encryption in general but about specific back doors that would defeat it. The tools we cover here work only because the encryption underneath them stays legal.
Funding is more diverse — but still exposed
Since 2020, funding for open-source internet-freedom tools has become more diverse. Foundations, allied-government programs, and individual donations all carry a larger share than they did before. Read our OTF explainer for the mechanics of the largest single source.
Even so, most of the ecosystem still runs on a small number of large public grants. A change in a single appropriations bill can still slow the pipeline for a whole quarter. Grantees know this and plan for it, but planning does not eliminate the risk. The 2020 letter did not fix that structural weakness. It only bought time to keep working on it.
Some projects have started to raise standing reserves so they can cover a missed grant cycle without laying off staff. Others have moved administrative work into smaller pooled entities that can share overhead across several tools. Neither answer scales to every project, and both add work that used to be handled by the funder. That is the current shape of the problem: better than it was, and still very much unfinished.
Why the playbook from 2020 still holds
The playbook the coalition used in 2020 still works. Write a short, plain letter. Aim it at the people who can actually make a decision. Get a global set of signatures on the record. Pair the letter with individual statements, press coverage, and quiet inside-the-building work.
Coalitions are still the highest-value thing the internet-freedom community can build. When it is used well, that playbook can move a program back onto solid ground within a single appropriations cycle — which is exactly what it did in 2020. That is why the fight to save internet freedom continues today, and why the tools we cover here need the same mix of technical work and coalition politics that they needed in 2020.