On August 11, 2026, Access Now marked ten years of its #KeepItOn campaign. It reported 313 shutdowns in 52 countries in 2025, up more than 300% from the 78 it documented in 2016. In the Middle East and North Africa, the 2025 regional report counted at least 52 shutdowns across 15 countries. Saudi Arabia appears in that tally once.
That low number is the interesting part. The Kingdom is not Iran, Iraq or Sudan, where armed conflict, school exams or unrest have triggered repeated blackouts. Its way of controlling connectivity looks different, and the difference matters for how the shutdown debate is framed.
The case for the regulator's approach
The strongest argument for Saudi-style regulation runs like this. A telecom regulator licenses operators, sets conditions for services that compete with licensed carriers, and needs to reach providers during emergencies. The Communications, Space and Technology Commission (CST) describes its job as to "protect users, promote investment, and foster fair competition" in communications and IT. It also runs a regulatory sandbox where firms can test new digital business models while working toward compliance. Compared with cutting off a whole region's mobile data, a conditional-licensing model is more targeted and leaves most services running. Seen that way, it is the proportionate alternative to a kill switch.
What the 2017 VoIP episode shows
The history complicates that picture. Saudi Arabia began blocking internet-calling apps in 2013. In September 2017 the regulator, then called the CITC, lifted the ban on VoIP applications that met its requirements. According to Arab News, FaceTime, Snapchat, Skype, Line, Telegram and Tango became available. The conditions were that providers remove content that violates the Kingdom's regulations, cooperate with the regulator in emergencies, and disclose how they handle users' personal data. WhatsApp was not on the approved list. When users asked why, the spokesman said the requirements were "subject to changes based on the changing course of events."
That last answer is the problem. A standard that can change with events gives providers no fixed rule to comply with. It also gives users no fixed rule to challenge. A shutdown is visible: measurement groups see traffic fall and can count the days. A service block applied through licensing conditions or filtering rarely shows up in a shutdown tally. Access Now's single Saudi entry for 2025 therefore says little about how restricted the Saudi internet is. It shows that the Kingdom restricts by a method the shutdown count was not built to capture.
Why the distinction matters for policy
For those who care about the open internet, there are three consequences.
- Counting is a design choice. Shutdown datasets record disruptions of access. They do not record a registered-and-conditional regime in which a service is allowed or blocked depending on its compliance posture. Policymakers who use "zero shutdowns" as a rights indicator will overrate countries that have moved to quieter tools.
- Conditions that require content removal are speech rules. A requirement to remove content that violates national regulations is a content-moderation mandate placed on foreign platforms through telecom licensing. Platforms accept it because the alternative is exclusion from the market. The speech burden is the same as under a platform law, but without a statute that is public, specific and open to court review.
- Innovation pays the price. VoIP and messaging apps compete on quality and price. When access depends on discretionary approval, new entrants face a regulatory cost that incumbents with legal teams can bear, and small developers cannot. That cuts against the digital-economy ambitions CST itself describes.
What proportionate regulation would look like
The fix is not to abolish telecom regulation. Emergency cooperation and data-handling disclosure are defensible requirements, and many democracies impose similar ones. The fix is to make the rules legible. A proportionate regime would publish the full list of conditions for service approval and the criteria for applying them. It would give a written reason when a service is refused or blocked, and offer an appeal to an independent body. It would also commit that licensing conditions will not be used to cut access to lawful communications, and it would report any blocking decisions publicly. The sandbox already shows CST can run a transparent, rules-based process when it wants to, and extending that discipline to service approval would be a modest step.
The broader lesson is for the #KeepItOn community. A decade of advocacy has built strong norms against blackouts, and the 313-shutdown figure shows those norms are being ignored in many places. But a campaign organised around shutdowns can miss a state that has no need to switch the network off. Advocacy that follows only the headline metric will track the crude tools and overlook the refined ones. Measurement of regulatory blocking, filtering and conditional licensing deserves the same investment as shutdown monitoring, so that comparisons across countries rest on how connectivity is actually controlled.
Saudi Arabia's record, as far as this evidence shows, is one of discretion rather than disconnection. Discretion is easier to defend in the short term and harder to hold accountable in the long term. The right response is more transparency about how it is exercised.