Follow-Up Friday is our attempt to put the news into context. Once a week, we’ll call out a recent headline, provide an update, and explain why it matters.
In the early spring of 2011, Iranian authorities made a series of bombastic public statements about government plans to strengthen their control over information. What emerged is the enduring specter of a “halal Internet” — a network cleansed of immorality and disconnected from the global Internet. Over the next several months, the political and religious establishment began to aggressively challenge the morality and security of the Internet, calling instead for a network that promoted the strict religious values promoted by the Islamic Republic. The then-Deputy Vice President for Economic Affairs described the vision for a national Internet as “a genuinely halal network, aimed at Muslims on an ethical and moral level.”
Iranian youths sit below carpet portraits of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini (L), supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei (R), and an Islamic religious portrait, in the city of Qom in 2013. (Behrouz Mehri / Getty Images)The atmosphere in Iran was tense that year. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had recently won a contested reelection plagued by accusations of fraud and months of protests. International audiences easily interpreted the talk of a national internet as a move to silence dissent. By September 2012, authorities were frequently threatening to block Google and demanding the public use domestic email services or else lose access to their e-banking services. As one hardline member of Majlis, the Iranian parliament, recently framed the issue, “at this moment the Iranian people are captive and entertained by a cyberspace that is in the hands of the United States.”
Many feared that Iran would disconnect from the internet entirely. But on the ground the situation has been more complicated. In 2013 Hassan Rouhani succeeded Ahmadinejad, and a few weeks ago, his more moderate administration declared the completion of the first phase of the program. So in the half-decade since the “halal internet” idea took root, what is Iran’s national Internet, and what exactly launched last month?
The internet of Iran has long been an island, with the government running it with a heavy hand since at least 2004. The scarce bridges connecting users to the global network are managed by a state-owned firm. That company’s monopoly on the international gateway afforded the government a single point of control, simplifying censorship and surveillance. When faced with political instability, the government could block more services, or even slow down all access to the internet. Still, traditional economic principles applied, and this monopoly led to technological stagnation. As more Iranians became connected, the country’s internet was among the most unstable in the world and was ill-equipped to fulfill growing demand. Until the government began to invest in national data centers in recent years, the domestic infrastructure was so poor that the state was forced to host its sites for public services in Europe and North America.
Fixing those weaknesses has been a prime focus of Iran’s “national information network,” which has developed much like a healthy internet anywhere else. Government entities have sponsored several Internet Exchange Points (IXPs) across the country. These IXPs allow internet service providers and content hosts to connect with each other locally — improving performance, increasing reliability and lowering costs. International organizations (such as the nonprofit Internet Society) have long promoted IXPs and local data centers for countries where bandwidth is expensive and connectivity is poor. With Iran’s new IXPs, less traffic has to leave the country, or even travel to Tehran — copies of popular content could be made available in users’ regions.
Of course, the new infrastructure doubles as a tool for control. Paired with financial incentives, the government has extended its reach even further. Already internet service providers are beginning to offer cheaper broadband packages that only provide access to domestic sites. The Iranian government has heavily subsidized data centers to encourage local companies to move content within their reach. Generous government funding, on the order of hundreds of millions of dollars, has supported the development of Iranian alternatives to popular foreign applications such as YouTube, Telegram and Facebook. Increasingly, domestic browsing is significantly more pleasant than accessing sites based outside the country. This experiential upgrade is the milestone Iran said it reached last month.
In promoting the strengthened infrastructure, officials have publicly invited Google and Telegram to host servers inside Iran. Thus far, these offers have not been accepted. As those companies understand, and officials openly acknowledge, doing so comes with a catch — it requires compliance with Iranian law.
The page that appeared when a user in Tehran tried to visit Facebook’s web site on May 2013, when the site was blocked. (Behrouz Mehri / Getty Images)Lacking Google’s cooperation, Iranian authorities have supported the creation of local variant, named Aparat, that has met with particular success. YouTube had been filtered as early as 2006, in reaction to pornographic, religious and political content hosted there. Streaming videos over anti-filtering tools is nearly impossible on slower connections. Aparat, by contrast, can take full advantage of the new IXPs and data centers to smoothly stream popular Persian-language media in high definition. For this reason, the availability of domestic streaming video platforms, such as Aparat and IPTV services, is a focus of the second phase of the national Internet, to be completed in February 2017. Aparat is a poster child for the future of the national Internet — an unfiltered service that is extremely fast but compliant with Iranian law.
In the lead-up to Iran’s elections last February, the Canadian organization ASL19 created a channel on Aparat for its parliamentary monitoring initiative, Majlis Monitor. As an organization that promotes filter circumvention tools and public accountability platforms in Iran, ASL19 has often been the subject of ire from hardline Iranian media. Shortly after launching, Majlis Monitor and other programs were quickly filtered. Within a month of creation, ASL19’s Aparat channel was deleted without notice. Pressed for explanation, Aparat claimed it had received a government order to remove the content based on Iran’s Cyber Crimes Law. The Cyber Crimes Law gives authorities broad discretion to police online activities, including criminalizing content that offends “public morality” and the “dissemination of lies.” While YouTube would be unlikely to remove Majlis Monitor, Aparat has little choice. Iran’s national internet has no place for ASL19.
It’s easy to point to censorship as the core motivation behind Iran’s domestic internet project. But the comprehensive sanctions imposed on Iran have inadvertently supported its creation, too. Iranians are blocked by Google from accessing sites hosted through several of its services, such as AppEngine. The IBM-owned SoftLayer network, which provides internet connectivity for thousands of private companies and websites, blocks all traffic originating from Iran. These are only a few of the almost countless restrictions imposed by companies against Iranian users in order to comply with American sanctions.
For the entrepreneurial, these limitations are opportunities for startups to thrive without the traditional competitors. Google’s restrictions on its Play Store, which blocks Iranian users from downloading most applications, led to the popularity of Cafe Bazaar, a local Android application market. But as with Aparat, the offerings on Cafe Bazaar are similarly regime-friendly. A search for “VPN” returns a paltry set of irrelevant results compared to the unending options for filter circumvention tools available on the Play Store.
Yet the Iranian government has in sum funded more losers than winners. National versions of operating systems, social networking sites, search engines and chat applications have floundered. Saina, promoted as an Iranian web browser, was little more than a copied version of Mozilla Firefox maintained by a university — until the students who built and maintained it seemed to have left the country for better jobs.
Under Ahmadinejad, the national Internet was routinely promoted as a government priority. By some measures, the Rouhani administration has shifted emphasis, instead staking its promises of social progress on improved internet access. One highly visible result is wider availability of 3G and 4G service beginning in August 2014, which became possible once license agreements granting two small companies exclusive rights to provide mobile broadband expired. Iran now has better connectivity, and the Internet filtering situation has not gotten worse. Whether or not the Rouhani administration is committed to the national internet, decisions over internet policy are partially out of its control. The mandate for the national internet comes from the Supreme Leader himself and is codified in formal development plans. Ayatollah Khamenei is reported to have even issued a directive in 2012 that the government should not increase the amount of international bandwidth prior to the completion of the national Internet. In effect, this has further politicized plans to improve Iran’s connectivity to the rest of the world, keeping internet access slow. In April 2015, the Majlis went so far as to issue a formal warning to the Minister of Information and Communications Technologies for continuing to increase bandwidth and failing to launch the national internet.
Iran’s national internet serves as a stark reminder of a principle often taken for granted. Rather than being an ethereal cloud, the Internet requires physical infrastructure that brings with it politics and control. In the national internet, non-compliance is handled through arresting administrators and turning servers off — much more effective than filtering. These issues are not unique to Iran nor are they easy to resolve. For many, the national internet will bring positive economic benefits at the cost of less tangible personal freedoms. This trade-off presents a template that other countries are bound to follow, a problem for the internet that extends beyond Iran.
