Internet censorship taken to the extreme? Photo credit: Wonderlane via flickr
Iran is set to replace the internet with a national intranet service, according to a flurry recent reports. The shutdown rumor was based on a statement purporting to be from Iranian Minister for Information and Communications Technology Reza Taghipour, announcing plans for a “clean internet” by August 2012. “For a country like Iran that exercises high levels of government control across sectors, establishing an insulated Internet shouldn’t be too much of a technical hassle. The new system would be more or less similar to the corporate intranet, where one can only access pages approved by the system administrators,” reported Amrutha Gayathri for The International Business Times.
Tehran has branded the statement a hoax, and blamed “Western propaganda” for the spread of the story. However, as Stewart Mitchell pointed out at PC Pro, “the officials didn’t deny plans for a ‘national information network’ that would act as a country-wide intranet by early 2013”.
It’s easy to see why the statement seems so plausible: “Iranian Internet users have grown accustomed to censorship. The country’s government cut off access to the Internet a few times earlier this year, the latest of which blocked access to all encrypted international sites outside the country that operate on Secure Sockets Layer protocol,” wrote Steven Musil at CNET. And Ryan Paul reported at Ars Technica that Iran topped a recent Reporters Without Borders list of “repressive regimes that most aggressively restrict Internet freedom”.
This isn’t the only Iran censorship story doing the rounds; according to the BBC, the regime may have blocked access to the London 2012 Olympics website: “Users in Iran have tweeted that they are unable to connect to london2012.com and are instead redirected to peyvandha.ir – a site offering stories from Iran’s official news agencies.”