Throttling
Deliberately degrading connection speed to specific services.
Definition
Throttling reduces bandwidth to targeted services without fully blocking them. This makes services unusably slow while maintaining plausible deniability—authorities can claim technical issues rather than censorship.
Throttling is particularly effective against video streaming, VoIP, and large file transfers where reduced bandwidth renders services impractical. It's harder to detect than outright blocking because connections technically succeed.
How We Detect This
We measure download speeds to test endpoints and compare against baseline measurements. Consistent speed degradation to specific services while other traffic performs normally indicates throttling. We account for network congestion by testing across multiple time periods and comparing to control measurements.
Examples
- •YouTube buffering while other sites load quickly
- •VPN connections slow to unusable speeds
- •Messaging app media downloads timing out