Formation of an “Anti-Filtering Committee” for e-businesses
Mohammad Javad Azari-Jahrami, Iran's Minister of Communications and Information Technology, announced the formation of an "anti-filtering committee" in the government. The committee's task is to prevent "healthy" from "unhealthy" activities in the field of electronic financial services from being filtered.
Azari-Jahromi, who was speaking at the 8th Annual Conference on Electronic Banking and Payment Systems, considered it possible to form a committee in cooperation with the Vice President's Legal Office and said that it was intended to prevent the filtering of what he called "healthy" businesses.
Iranian media have referred to the committee mentioned by the Iranian Minister of Communications as the "Anti-Filtering Committee": "Sometimes, instead of creating obstacles for unauthorized activities, authorized activities are filtered. To address such problems, the Anti-Filter Committee was formed in the government."
This young member of the Rouhani government's cabinet is referring to removing obstacles to greater use of financial services technologies (FinTech) in the field of online businesses and electronic banking services.
Without providing statistics or figures, he considered the fintech economy in Iran to be a growing trend during 2017: "Of course, we were not very successful in the area of fintech growth and we must ease the obstacles they face."
Telegram still filtered, Instagram next!
Azari-Jahrami has not provided any explanation about the "scope of support" of the Anti-Filtering Committee and whether websites and social networks are also covered by this committee's support.
Telegram is one of the most used social media apps by Iranian users for starting businesses and economic activities. This app gained more attention among Iranian users after the protests of 2017.
Telegram was filtered some time ago by order of judicial authorities. However, Iran's Deputy Attorney General for Cyberspace Affairs said: "30 million and 100 thousand people bypass the Telegram filter through Hotgram and Golden Telegram filter breakers."
Instagram, which is considered the second most popular application among Iranian users, is facing challenges from the government and the judicial structure, and although there are whispers of its being filtered, it has not yet been implemented.
Previously, Javad Karimi-Ghodousi, a representative from Mashhad in the Islamic Consultative Assembly, quoted Azari-Jahromi as saying, "We will soon filter out these insolent people."
The scope of the Anti-Filtering Committee's activities and support is not clearly defined, and how users of the "healthy" activities mentioned by the Iranian Minister of Communications on Telegram and Instagram can cross the border of official filtering in Iran.
Source: DW
