Throttling (as censorship)
termISP & telecomprivacy
Deliberately reducing available bandwidth until services degrade - video first, then images, then messaging - while the connection technically continues to work.
It is the deniable form of a shutdown and increasingly the preferred one: no outage appears, operators can attribute it to congestion, and users blame their own devices. Achieving most of a blackout's effect without producing an event anyone can point at is precisely the appeal. This is why independent network measurement matters more than it sounds - without a documented, dated technical record, throttling is an argument about whether the internet feels slow, and that is an argument nobody wins.
Also known as: bandwidth throttling, estrangulamento, degradation, deniable blocking