Iran Mail? Iran to launch "National Internet" in August

[nsane.forums]

Iran plans to finally cut off access to the rest of the Internet sometime in August and replace it with a National Internet with its own internal online information services.

The country of Iran has been saying it would cut off access to the outside Internet for its citizens for some time. Now it appears that Iran has a new timetable for their "national Internet" to go live. International Business Times reports that according to a statement from the Iranian minister for Information and Communications Technology, their internal Internet service would officially go live in August.

Previously the country indicated that their "national Internet" would go live in February, and then pushed that launch date back to June. Now the country is saying that the first phase will actually begin in May when online services from Google, Hotmail and Yahoo will be blocked. People in Iran who want access to, say, web email services and searches will have to use (and we are not kidding) Iran Mail and Iran Search Engine starting in May.

In August, Iran is set to launch the second and final phase of its "national Internet" project when the country blocks access to all foreign web sites inside Iran. Iranian officials have said such sites promote "crime, disunity, unhealthy moral content, and atheism." However, its more likely that the country's government simply want to keep Western web sites from being seen by its citizens who might later start a revolution against Iran's current leadership.

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[Nima]

This will never happen as I told before, it costs too much and there are many reasons behind it that will prevent it from happening, government has many more important problems rather than the internet issue. ;)

[Nemesis]

This will never happen as I told before, it costs too much and there are many reasons behind it that will prevent it from happening, government has many more important problems rather than the internet issue. ;)

not quite so. its a major issue for the Iranian government, especially since its probably the single cause for all the videos of their war crimes being released to the world.

[babelpatcher]

high cost?

Iran is a super rich country, not a single person

great country with great policy

[tezza]

Why Iran May Never Create a "Closed Internet"

Iran could certainly cut off its global Internet connections. But whether it ever would is a question of politics and economics.

Will Iran shutting down global Internet connections by August--as has been widely reported in recent days--and create a “clean Internet” that only dishes up government-controlled content and government-run email?

There are indications these reports are based on a hoax, or at best reflect some misunderstanding of what was reported by internal news services in Iran. Either way, the Iranian regime is clearly a leading Internet repressor, made even more paranoid by events in Egypt and Tunesia. So the reports raise the question of whether such a draconian move is actually possible.

At the level of technology only, the answer is “yes.” I asked Hal Roberts, a leading investigator of national censorship programs, how this might work, and he replied:

“…It would be technically easy for the Iranian government to shut down the connections between its national network and the rest of the Internet for as long as it likes. In that case, existing circumvention tools would be of no use, so they function by hiding traffic to filtered sites within those Internet connections. There are some options to allow very limited network access in this case, such as mesh networks connected to satellite or cross border cell towers, but in the best cases those solutions are only capable of serving a tiny bit of bandwidth to a tiny portion of the current Iranian Internet population (enough maybe to allow leaking of dissident stories, photos, and video or very bare bones local social media services, but nothing like the current Internet).”

But as China has come to realize (see our feature on the Chinese way of Internet control), their economy has come to depend on the Internet. Business, not just dissidents, need the global connections. And this is true in Iran, too, sanctions notwithstanding. So as Roberts put it: “The much more interesting, important, and difficult question is whether shutting its citizens off from the rest of the Internet for an extended period would be socially, economically, and politically feasible for the Iranian government.”

Many observers have said the Internet is at increasing risk of devolving, to some extent, in the direction of controlled national Intranets and product-centric networks. The hope is that a globally-connected Internet has shown enough of its value, even to the Iranian regime, that it is no longer possible to simply cut it off.

http://www.technolog.../27718/?ref=rss

[DKT27]

Iran now denies it will block off Internet access

The government of Iran is now denying an earlier report that claimed it was preparing to block out access to the outside world's Internet services, claiming the first report was a hoax.

Iran's citizens may be able to continue viewing Internet sites like Google, Yahoo and others after all. Earlier this week, a report surfaced that claimed the government of Iran was going to block out access to the outside Internet by August, replacing it with its own internal "national Internet" service.

Now AFP (via Google) reports that the Iranian government's ministry of communication and information technology has said the original story was in fact a hoax, claiming that the first story was generated by "the propaganda wing of the West and providing its hostile media with a pretext emanating from a baseless claim."

Even if that first story was in fact false, Iran's government does still have plans to establish some kind of internal online network, although it is not clear yet if it is designed to take the place of the regular Internet in that country.

Iran has also showed that it has the will to block access to the Internet for its citizens in the past. In February, it was reported that Iranian residents were unable to access outside online services such as Hotmail, Gmail and Yahoo Mail for a number of hours, although some citizens in that country were able to access the net via VPN connections.

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