A new regulatory directive from Iran’s highest internet governing body has revealed how authorities hope to guide Iranians away from foreign platforms and turn them towards local ones.
Iran’s top internet policymaking body had released an order earlier this week stipulating new rules with potentially wide-ranging ramifications for the country’s already limited internet landscape, which the agency says were endorsed by Supreme Leader Ali Hosseini Khamenei.
The Supreme Council of Cyberspace—SCC) had declared that using “refinement-breaking tools” was henceforth “forbidden” unless the user has a legal permit already obtained.
The above named is the new word Iranian authorities have come up with for virtual private networks (VPNs), which are online privacy tools that mask the user’s IP (internet protocol), which a lot of Iranians use constantly to bypass heavy internet restrictions.
All popular social media platforms, including Instagram, Twitter, YouTube and Telegram, are prohibited in Iran along with thousands of websites, but they are still highly popular with tens of millions of users – prompting users to resort to circumvention tools for some years now.
Iran had made buying and selling the VPNs illegal in 2022, but news that using them, even without any commercial transaction involved, would also be prohibited had stirred backlash online.
Many have pointed out that a great majority of Iranians have no other option but to use them if they wish to access the free internet, so prohibiting VPNs illegal would successfully include most people in the country.
The SCC Secretary, Mohammad Amin Aghamiri had told state television a day after the commotion that the regulations do not include the general public, and are only aimed at top state entities which include: the office of the supreme leader, the presidency, the judiciary and the parliament.
