Tehran, Iran – A new regulatory directive from Iran’s top internet governing body shows how authorities hope to steer Iranians away from foreign platforms and towards local platforms.
Iran’s top internet policy body issued a directive earlier this week that sets new rules with potentially far-reaching consequences for the country’s already limited internet landscape. According to the agency, this directive was approved by Supreme Leader Ali Hosseini Khamenei.
The Supreme Council for Cyberspace (SCC) claimed that the use of “sophistication-breaking tools” is now “prohibited” unless the user has obtained a legal permit.
That’s the new word Iranian authorities have coined for virtual private networks (VPNs), online privacy tools that mask the user’s IP (internet protocol) address, which most Iranians regularly use to circumvent onerous internet restrictions.
All major social media platforms, including Instagram, Twitter, YouTube and Telegram, are banned in Iran, along with thousands of websites, but they remain highly popular with tens of millions of users – prompting users to resort to circumvention tools for years.
Iran had made the buying and selling of VPNs illegal in 2022, but the news that their use, even without any commercial transaction, would also be banned sparked a backlash online.
Many pointed out that an overwhelming majority of Iranians have no choice but to use them if they want to access the free internet, so if the use of VPNs were made illegal, most people in the country would effectively be involved become.
SCC Secretary Mohammad Amin Aghamiri told state television a day after the outcry that the regulations do not apply to the general public and only target the highest state entities – including the office of the supreme leader, the presidency, the judiciary and parliament. .
Pushing away foreign platforms
But regardless of who the VPN ban affects, the SCC directive contains other rules that call for wholesale changes to Iran’s internet landscape.
First, the Ministry of Culture is asked to work with the Ministries of Economy and Information and Communications Technology (ICT) to come up with a plan within a month that would encourage content creators and companies operating on foreign platforms to “ remain strictly on local platforms”. . The goal: to bring at least half of the target group to local platforms within six months.
This essentially means that the SCC wants much of the content created by people in Iran on the wildly popular Instagram and YouTube to be moved to local platforms. It is unclear how the government plans to achieve this within a few months.
“Any advertisement by legal entities on foreign platforms is illegal,” states the directive, which orders the Ministry of Culture, state television, law enforcement, the Ministry of Economy and the judiciary to monitor and report quarterly to bring.
In addition, the ICT Ministry has been instructed to provide “only comprehensive and essential government services” on local platforms, with at least two services to be ready within six months.
Some of this has been in the works for years.
The Iranian state has been working on a ‘National Information Network’, requiring websites and services to locate their servers within Iran, restricting some government services to local platforms only, and making global internet traffic cost twice as much as local traffic to avoid using local internet to stimulate. services.
Unblocked ‘shells’ from foreign platforms
Another part of the SCC directive could also have a significant impact on the way social media platforms are used in Iran.
It stipulates that authorities must provide technical capabilities that allow Iranians to access “useful foreign services” in the form of “navigable formats.”
This could include negotiations for foreign platforms to establish representative offices in Iran, in addition to “windows of access” baked into local platforms, and “shells” of foreign platforms that would not be blocked like the main versions, according to the report.
No foreign company that runs social media platforms has agreed to post representatives in Iran – who would be accountable to the Iranian state – and major brands such as US-based Meta have said they are not interested.
As for the so-called grenades, the Iranians have experienced them before and have been exposed to privacy breaches as a result.
In 2018, after Iran blocked the hugely popular messaging app Telegram, citing its alleged use in inciting and enabling “riots” during a period of protests and unrest, Iranians began using unfiltered grenades from the app .
Iran also suffered a near-total internet blackout that lasted nearly a week during the November 2019 protests that began after the government significantly raised gasoline prices.
These shells would allow unblocked access, but would have access to users’ data as it passed through them before reaching the native app’s servers. This exposed millions of Iranians to data breaches and fraud before people became aware of the dangers.
Now the Iranian state wants to officially approve such grenades, essentially inviting people to use them instead of the main apps that will remain blocked.
Internet restrictions in Iran reached new levels after nationwide protests began in September 2022 following the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini in police custody.
