New filtering roadmap and the "instructions" of the Leader of the Islamic Republic
On Sunday, December 1, the Iranian parliament rejected an urgent bill to regulate social media. The supporters of the bill, 95 of whom are members of the Omid (Reformist) faction of the parliament, intended to add the bill to Article 67, Paragraph 3, of the Sixth Development Plan Law in the form of two notes, but they failed to obtain the necessary votes.
Article 67 of the Development Plan is mainly dedicated to policies related to the National Information Network.
The "Social Media Regulation" plan is currently being reviewed as usual by the Islamic Consultative Assembly's Cultural Commission. Two months after the final approval of this 32-article plan, "all domestic and foreign messaging platforms" are expected to comply with it.
Efforts to regulate social media are a long-standing debate that has been pursued in numerous meetings of the “High Council of Cyberspace” from January 1, 2016 to June 1, 2017, leading to the approval of a high-level document titled “Social Media Policies and Measures.” According to Article 11 of its internal regulations, the decisions of this council are communicated by the secretary of the council after the Leader of the Islamic Republic is informed. This process lasted until August 2017, and on August 7 of that year, this high-level document was communicated to the relevant agencies.
After its announcement, the Islamic Consultative Assembly sought to turn this high-level document into law, and two institutions, the "Parliamentary Cyberspace Committee" and the "Parliamentary Research Center," became active in this regard. The result of these efforts has been the controversial "Social Messaging Regulation" plan. But why is this plan controversial:
1) The first controversial issue of this plan is the formation of a “supervision board,” an institution similar to the Press Supervision Board, but broader and more targeted. This institution, which has 13 members, includes seven representatives from institutions affiliated with or close to the Leader of the Islamic Republic (the judiciary, the Iranian Broadcasting Corporation, the Revolutionary Guard Corps, the Islamic Propaganda Organization, the law enforcement agencies, the Passive Defense Organization, and the seminary), who will have relative control over the oversight board.
This board is “responsible for monitoring domestic and foreign messengers and making decisions about their continued activity based on the approvals of the Supreme Council for Cyberspace.” More precisely, the work that has so far been carried out sporadically by the “National Cyberspace Center,” the “Working Group for Determining Instances of Criminal Content,” the “Deputy Attorney General’s Office for Cyberspace Affairs,” and judicial branches is to be monitored, decided, and implemented by this board, and the “judiciary” will become its executive arm for imposing the punishments foreseen in the law.
One of the most interesting penalties in this plan is imprisonment or a fine for those who create channels or groups on filtered messaging services such as Telegram. In addition, individuals or institutions must obtain a license to operate effectively on messaging services and “create channels and groups.” The Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance is expected to announce the conditions for effective activity, but if this resolution also includes personal channels, each citizen who intends to set up a channel must obtain a license.
According to a report published in February 2017 by the National Cyberspace Research Institute, affiliated with the National Cyberspace Center, the number of Persian channels on Telegram had reached more than 754,000 as of February 2017. Even if we consider that 20 percent of these channels were closed after Telegram was filtered, based on the provisions of the new law, we currently have only 500,000 illegal channels on Telegram, whose activities are essentially a violation of the law and must obtain permits for their activities on other messengers after leaving Telegram. This number sufficiently demonstrates the irregularity and unenforceability of such a law.
2) According to this plan, the activities of foreign messengers will be permitted “only after the full launch of the National Information Network” and the approval of the launch by the Supreme Council of Cyberspace. The launch of the National Information Network has been on the agenda of the Iranian parliament and government since 2005, and according to the Fifth Development Plan, it should have been completed by the end of 2016.
On March 11, 2017, Iranian Minister of Communications Mohammad Javad Azari-Jahrami said that it will take two years to finalize all projects related to this network, and it seems that there is no news of the full launch of the national information network until at least the end of 2019. It can be said that the founders of the plan, with this article, have denied the possibility of foreign messengers operating in any form until further notice, so that the facilities are completely monopolized by domestic messengers.
3) Another controversial article of this plan is the implementation of “digital border and cyber defense” centered on the “General Staff of the Armed Forces” and approved by the Commander-in-Chief of the Forces. Currently, the main controller of internet gateways is the Ministries of Communications and Information. The Iranian Minister of Communications, who announced his opposition to these changes on November 5, 2018, said, “Some believe that the Ministry of Communications and operators do not have the necessary authority to enforce governance regulations and filter cyberspace.”
To better understand this issue, we can refer to the activities of the IRGC Intelligence Organization alongside the Ministry of Intelligence in a realistic simulation, which has gradually led to the government and the Ministry of Intelligence being overshadowed in many security and intelligence cases and activities. Gholamreza Jalali, head of the country's Passive Defense Organization, emphasized on November 12, 2018 that "the government or the ministries of intelligence and communications should not worry about having a new security layer alongside them," saying: "The Cyber Defense Headquarters is responsible for the country's digital border guarding, and the recent plan is only to validate the legal identity of this headquarters."
According to the provisions of the "National Cyber Defense Strategic Document" which was issued on June 11, 2015, with the approval of the Leader of the Islamic Republic and the signature of the Chief of Staff of the Armed Forces, the "Cyber Defense Headquarters" operates under the supervision of the "National Passive Defense Organization." This organization has been appointed since 2013 based on the order of Ayatollah Khamenei, and its head is appointed upon the proposal of the Chief of Staff of the Armed Forces and the decree of the Commander-in-Chief.
Thus, if the plan is finalized, the appointees of the Leader of the Islamic Republic will take control of internet portals, in addition to controlling the Supervisory Board. In recent years, the Leader of the Islamic Republic has been repeatedly quoted as saying, "If I were not the leader, I would be the follower and head of cyberspace."
The "social media regulation" plan can be described as a new step towards implementing this demand. Ayatollah Khamenei, who has been pursuing and presiding over this area since March 2011 by forming the Supreme Council for Cyberspace, now has a new roadmap available to implement his demands, with the executive arms in place to monitor and control social media and internet gateways.
This new plan, of course, requires financial and logistical support, and accordingly, the plan also makes some strange suggestions for supporting domestic messengers, including that “licensing and activating mobile phones” is conditional on the pre-installation of effective domestic messengers. The Central Bank will grant these messengers licenses to use and offer “cryptocurrency,” “electronic payment,” and “electronic wallets,” and a “Domestic Content and Messenger Support Fund” will be established with the aim of “strengthening Iranian-Islamic premium content.”
These various proposals have been put on the table while in the past six months, despite the allocation of a five billion toman loan, five gigabytes of free bandwidth, and a 70 percent reduction in the tariff for using domestic messaging services, it was announced that the government would stop supporting five messaging services and that domestic audiences still preferred to use Telegram, using filter breakers - the use of which has tripled. This news was clearly a sign of the failure of the policy of localizing messaging services.
On October 10, 2018, Mohammad Javad Azari-Jahrami said on the television program "Dastakhat" in December 2017, "One of the country's high-ranking officials... said that domestic social networks have told us that we can cover 40 million subscribers today... I told him that it is very good that they have self-confidence, but their capacity is one and a half million people. He did not accept my request. When the events of January 2017 happened, Telegram and Instagram were out of reach and they turned to social networks, but before reaching one million, everyone had problems. The same official called me and said that I gained confidence in what you said that day, today you were right and they did not have this capacity."
According to available evidence, after the January events, the Ministry of Communications, in order to secure the opinion of high-ranking officials, took a generous approach and granted numerous financial and logistical facilities to domestic messaging services. Despite the failure of these gifts and favors, it seems that the founders of the “Organization of Domestic Messaging Services” plan want to spread a richer table for the managers of domestic messaging services. This is not surprising, and in Iranian politics and economy, there is a lot of room for wasting resources, and for now, bread is soft in war.
Source: Radio Farda
