Iran rolls out domestic internet

Iran has announced it has completed the first phase of its plan to operate a ‘national internet’.

An inauguration ceremony was held on Sunday by the country’s communications and information technology minister, Mahmoud Vaezi, reports BBC online.

The state news agency Irna said the initiative would offer ‘high quality, high speed’ connections at ‘low costs’.

But critics suggest the true aim is to tighten the authorities’ control over citizens’ use of the net.

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).

‘Inefficient’ filters

The idea behind the project was first made public in 2010, and it was originally intended to be fully operational by 2015.

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

It intends to replace the current system, in which officials seek to limit which parts of the existing internet people have access to via filters - an effort Mr Vaezi described as being ‘inefficient’.

‘All domestic activities, services, applications [and] various types of contents... are included in the national internet,’ he declared at the launch.

The minister 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.