Iran Blocks Google, Moves Forward With Domestic Network Plans 134
hlovy writes "Iran moved forward with their previously discussed plans for a domestic version of the Internet over the weekend, as government officials announced that Google would be one of the first websites to be filtered through their state-controlled information network. According to Reuters, officials are claiming that the country's self-contained version of the World Wide Web, which was first announced last week, is part of an initiative to improve cyber security. However, it will reportedly also give the country the ability to better control the type of information that users can access online."
IPv4 (Score:4, Interesting)
Is this going to free up a bit of IPv4 address space?
Beginning of the end? (Score:5, Interesting)
Back when I was in college 10 - 12 years ago the internet was this thing that would never be tamed. It was the wild west of free expression that could never be taken away. Censorship would be automatically routed around and all was good. That was a common belief by many here and in academia. I had one professor, philosophy professor with an undergrad in comp sci from Berkeley back in the 70's and a masters in math, who thought it very differently. He felt by 2020 the beast would be tamed, the powers that be would find ways to regulate it and bring it back under their control. The genie, he insisted, would indeed be put in the bottle. Not only that, but it would be come the tool of easy mass surveillance and that the internet would be the end of privacy as we knew it. I didn't want to believe him either, but a decade later here we are. And it seems like he was more right than wrong.
When China erected its Great Firewall it proved the internet could indeed be censored. Is it perfect, no, but it doesn't have to be. Just good enough. Soon a lot of countries were doing it.
Now, if (and I stress if) Iran can create their own internal network and succeeds then it is the end of the "internet" as we know it. The world wide web will be Balkanized so that content can be better regulated by local regimes.
Re:Hey (Score:5, Interesting)
The Iranian revolution was anything but. My relatives tell me that the Shah was reasonably fair — sure, kind of a dictator, but he and his father had taken the country from an agragrian backwater to a modern industrial society in a matter of two generations — and basically... the U.S. funded student groups, pro-democracy organizations, &c and sowed dissent so that none of them would agree enough to stand in unity... and then gave guns to the Ayatollah. All because the Shah had the audacity to defy U.S. regional interests... funny, since the U.S. basically cemented the power of the Shah too (didn't count on an educated populace making a gradual transition to democracy, eh?). Left to their own devices, in all likelihood there would have been a democratic revolution in the 80s and the entire geopolitical situation would be different.
My father and many of his friends are still here in the U.S. because they were in a University exchange program learning various engineering disciplines when it all went down. It really is a shame... and then the youth attempted a real revolution just before the Arab Spring, and ... well, where was the U.S. when people started disappearing and the Revolutionary Guard was slaughtering people on the streets? Really, the work of the CIA in 70s is amazing: they managed to install such a brutally repressive regime that any hope of the people revolting has been quelled for over 30 years. It's not in our best interests to have a free Iran, or a free middle east. But, hey, when we think the populace is sheepish enough to accept a puppet... time to liberate!
Re:So, basically Iran is deploying a LAN? (Score:5, Interesting)
I think we know enough about Iran's internal power dynamic to know that Khameini and the Guardian Council themselves are just figureheads. It certainly was the case when Khomeini was Supreme Leader that the position was unassailable, but Khameini was always considered a relatively weak man, and almost certainly since 2009 Iran is now really run by the Revolutionary Guard and the leadership of the Basij. If Khameini was independent before, he is now a sick old man dominated by the "guardians of the Islamic revolution", and most certainly when he kicks the bucket, the next Supreme Leader will be the Revolutionary Guard's man. The day when the Supreme Leader was an independent authority capable of bringing the other factions to heal are gone. Iran is essentially a thinly veiled military dictatorship.