The Iranian government will restore part of international Internet access to university professors and researchers, according to The New York Times, but the majority of the population has remained practically disconnected from the global network for seven weeks.
For more than 50 days, for the majority of Iranians, the Internet stopped being the Internet. The Government says that the almost total blockade was imposed for “national security reasons”, during the war with the United States and Israel, but the result was a different day-to-day situation: families having difficulty speaking to relatives outside the country, companies dependent on the network almost at a standstill, public information funneled through state media. And more than 90 million people forced into a domestic connection, closed in on themselves and watched by authorities.
The count is from NetBlocks, an organization that monitors digital restrictions, cited by The New York Times: seven weeks of blackout. Open access to the international Internet was limited to a few Iranian officials and a restricted group of authorized elites. For the rest, there is a parallel, internal network, with no free connection to international sites and subject to State control.
In recent days, Tehran has begun to ease small parts of the blockade, but without actually returning the Internet to the country. Iranian semi-official media reported that Google searches and Google Maps were once again available. Experts interviewed by The New York Times warn, however, that opening is limited: users can search, but are still unable to open most of the sites that appear in the results.
It was in this context that Seyed Mehdi Abtahi, Iranian Deputy Minister of Science, announced this Sunday that teachers and researchers will now have access to most international websites, with the exception of those that remain censored. “Based on a list we had, steps were taken to guarantee teachers access to the international Internet, and this will gradually be extended to all teachers,” said Abtahi, quoted by the semi-official ISNA agency.
The announcement, which in other circumstances might have seemed merely administrative, was welcomed by many Iranians as a sign of the depth of the blockade. Some of those who have managed to connect through clandestine, expensive and unstable solutions have criticized the public enthusiasm around the measure. Journalist Elaheh Mohammadi asked on social media “how things got to the point” that people were excited about a partial connection to Google, “to open a few simple links,” which she described as “the most basic right of access.” “They want to lower people’s expectations so much that even the smallest things start to seem like a favor,” Mohammadi wrote. “This is the ultimate disregard for people’s dignity.”
Last week, some providers also started offering a service called “Internet Pro”, with international connections, but only for those who have state approval. Academics, businesspeople and defenders of digital freedom see the outlines of a “tiered Internet”, as many Iranians call it: an open network for those who are politically trustworthy, economically useful or institutionally protected; another, short and monitored, for the rest of the country.
Amir Rashidi, a cybersecurity expert at Miaan, an organization focused on digital rights in Iran, described the change to The New York Times as deeper than a technical decision. “In Iran, the Internet is no longer being treated as a public right. It is being reframed as a ‘strategic infrastructure’ whose level of access can be adjusted based on security concerns and high-level state priorities,” he said. “When Internet access passes from a logic of rights to a logic of security governance, it no longer belongs to everyone equally,” added Rashidi.
