Iran starts rolling out its own ‘domestic internet’

Iran has completed the first phase of its plan to operate a “national internet”, the country’s communications minister Mahmoud Vaezi has announced.

State news agency Irna said that the scheme would offer “high quality, high speed” internet connections at “low costs”, but critics have warned that its true aim is to tighten the government’s control over citizens’ use of the net.

The government says its goal is to create an isolated domestic internet that can be used to promote Islamic content and raise public digital awareness.

It will replace the current system, in which officials seek to limit which parts of the existing internet its citizens have access to via filters – an effort Vaezi admitted was “inefficient”.

"All domestic activities, services, applications [and] various types of contents... are included in the national internet," the minister declared at the launch on Sunday.

He added that the initiative would make it easier to combat cyber-threats. At the ceremony, another official said the Information Technology ministry had recently had to combat several distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks - attempts to overwhelm its computer servers by flooding them with traffic.

Mehr, a Tehran-based news agency, reported that the first phase of the rollout involves providing access to e-government services and domestic web pages. A second phase, due in February 2017, will add domestic video content. A third phase, due the following month, will introduce further services and provide support for companies involved in international trade.

Local reports insist that users' privacy will be respected.

However, British human rights campaign group Article 19 has warned that this might not be the case.

"Given Iran's record in violating its human rights commitments based on civil and political (including religious and ethnic) grounds, the development of projects such as the national internet are especially concerning," it said in a report published earlier this year. "The National Internet Project could pave the way for further isolation, surveillance and information retention.

"[It] risks severely isolating the Iranian people from the rest of the online world, limiting access to information and constraining attempts at collective action and public protest."

Although Iran already blocks access to overseas-based social media services - including Twitter, Instagram and Facebook - many users still access them via proxy sites and virtual private networks (VPNs).