Physical Address
304 North Cardinal St.
Dorchester Center, MA 02124
Tehran, Iran Iranian authorities have restored it other internet access three months after taking the world on the Internet at the beginning of the war with the United States and Israel, but restrictions are still in place for many people.
The Iranian government said last week that it had begun the process of bringing back access to the Internet before the war, which had previously been restricted because Iran was on the verge of a 20-day shutdown. deadly protests across the country in January.
Recommended Articles
list of things 3end of series
Last week’s move ended more than 2,000 hours of internet shutdowns across the country of 90 million people, the longest blackout in the world.
But according to many user reports, social media accounts and expert analysis, Iranians’ free access to the Internet around the world has not been restored.
Up to millions of websites remain blocked by the government, and almost all international services such as YouTube, Instagram, Telegram, WhatsApp, Facebook and Waze are closed and are not considered to be restored.
Mobile, wireless and landline connections are slow and intermittent, to varying degrees, while many local services are constantly interrupted or fail to download.
Some Google services work, while others don’t. On Microsoft Windows, Wi-Fi restarts due to network interruptions. Gamers, for their part, have to deal with the so-called “high ping”, which makes it difficult and difficult in the game.
Many people are forced into the black market to access the Internet, which has proven profitable for those who sell private networks (VPN) or other circumvention methods, often through government ties.
Those connections have now become cheaper after the government restored internet bandwidth, but the demand for VPNs has skyrocketed, and people remain vulnerable to scammers and malware while navigating the market.
‘Architecture of filtering’
Meanwhile, despite the partial reopening, Iranian authorities continue to impose a series of restrictions that have turned internet access into a privilege only enjoyed by a limited number of government-authorized individuals.
Many data centers have not been fully restored to the Internet, and some Internet protocols such as IPv6 and HTTP/3 have been blocked, while others such as UDP are being disrupted by government officials, local media reported.
An expert who spoke to Al Jazeera in the background said that many foreign IP addresses are currently not completely blocked but are placed in a “grey” environment.
In fact, when the connections are allowed to start, the amount of traffic and the number of data packets that the government allows for public use is very low, making the connection poor.
If the communication is “allowed” to proceed by the authorities, however, there will be little or no restrictions.
This has led to mounting criticism against Iran’s moderate President Masoud Pezeshkian, who has campaigned against hardliners, among other things, by reopening the internet.
The revolutionary Sazandegi newspaper criticized the government for the “late opening” on Saturday while the government-affiliated website KhabarOnline wrote that “Internet technology is the focus of the new infrastructure”.
But the Pezeshkian administration is also under fire from hardliners who want it to be kept under complete lockdown.
Iranian media reported that several powerful members of the Supreme National Cybersecurity Council and other government agencies tried to block the project by getting the Court of Justice to issue an order to stop the project. the government agency that ordered the reopening.
Government spokesman Fatemeh Mohajerani was discussed on state television during an interview on Sunday, where the host insisted that the court order would stand, so that the process of restoring the Internet would not be legal.
‘This is not the internet’
The authorities have also failed to explain what they want to do with tiered-access internet system that they began to grow during the war.
As part of this system, Iranians get varying degrees of access – or no access at all – to the global Internet depending on their occupation and other government-created groups.
To complement this scheme, a scheme called “Internet Pro” was introduced, which offers a slightly reduced access to almost three times the price of a regular, highly restricted Internet package.
A user who contacted the government through a university told Al Jazeera that it was still operating on Sunday, and that the telecommunications provider had announced that it had no intention of suspending the service or issuing refunds.
But state-run Mobile Communications of Iran (MCI) quietly took down its “Internet Pro” website last week.
As uncertainty continues, comment sections on government websites continue to be filled with messages of anger and frustration over the ongoing internet disruptions, have a significant impact on businesses and workers in the tanking economy.
However, more and more people have returned to social media, where they posted more videos of the war, including one that showed a new perspective when several missiles fell on the headquarters of the supreme leader of Iran in the city of Tehran on February 28.
Others recount the war, including where they were and how they felt when the first bombs hit the capital.
But this did not reduce the frustration of many. “What we have right now is not the internet,” said a resident of Tehran, who spoke to Al Jazeera anonymously. “It’s going back to what was previously closed and being marketed as a success.”
