Internet restrictions in Iran and the 600 billion market for filter breakers
The free flow of information has become the number one enemy of the Islamic Republic's officials and officials since the day the Internet entered Iran, an enemy they tried to fight with filtering, but failed every time.
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the leader of the Islamic Republic, has repeatedly criticized the Internet and cyberspace in his speeches over the past few years, calling on officials to control this space. In his latest speech to judicial officials, he said, “Every day, a piece of news and a rumor in cyberspace disrupts the peace of society, and the judiciary must deal with this issue, even if there is no law in this regard. A law should be written and implemented immediately.”
The Leader of the Islamic Republic's strong insistence on controlling the Internet and cyberspace has launched a plan in the parliament called the "Protection Plan," a plan that has not yet been turned into law and is being passed around in various institutions of the system. Experts say that this plan, contrary to its name, is a plan to kill the global Internet and limit it to the domestic or national Internet.
One of the important issues in the protection plan considered by representatives and experts is Article 20. According to Article 20 of this plan, any commercial activity in the field of unauthorized production, distribution, reproduction, and supply of "VPNs" is prohibited, but apparently this prohibition does not include all filter breakers, and even the issue of official and legal sale of filter breakers is raised.
Using VPNs or filter breakers is one way to bypass filtering in Iran, a method that is costly for ordinary people but is a breadwinner for a group. A member of the Internet Business Association recently told IRNA: “The turnover of VPN sales in Iran is 50 billion tomans per month and 600 billion tomans per year.”
Mohammad Javad Azari-Jahrami, the Minister of Communications and Information Technology in the Rouhani government, also spoke in a public session of the parliament in September 2019 about the existence of a filter-breaking mafia and the multi-hundred-billion-dollar business selling filter-breaking services.
An IT expert says that the security plan refers to businesses selling VPNs. Milad Nouri adds: In the discussion of legal or classified VPNs, the user will need legal VPNs with the extensive restrictions that the security plan brings, with any type of use of any level of the Internet. This causes the current VPN market volume to be consolidated with legal VPNs.
It seems that the market worth several hundred billion tomans for VPNs and filter breakers and the high profits of this market have not escaped the attention of the government, and in addition to the plan to restrict the internet, it intends to funnel this money from the mafia's pockets into its own coffers.
Source: Voice of America
