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A senior Iranian official has revealed that Tehran has imported advanced Chinese technology in a bid to permanently cut off access to the global Internet.
The revelation came amid an unprecedented Internet blackout in Iran, where the authorities imposed a shutdown after the start of the war with the United States and Israel on February 28.
Mohammad Sarafraz, a member of Iran’s Supreme Council of Cyberspace and former head of state broadcaster IRIB, told the online newspaper Faraz on May 23 that the Chinese hardware was already in the country.
The purpose of the technology, he said, was to lay the groundwork for the permanent throttling of the Internet while only allowing tightly monitored access for select users in the country of some 90 million people.
Now in its third month, Iran’s nationwide Internet blackout is the longest since Libya’s nearly six-month outage during the Arab Spring protests in 2011. But with Iran’s population around 15 times larger than Libya’s, the shutdown in the Islamic republic is the largest government-directed communications blackout in recorded history, experts say.
Internet monitoring watchdog NetBlocks has described the disruption in Iran as “unsurpassed in scale and severity in a connected society.”
The authorities have attempted to justify the Internet blackout by claiming that it prevents foreign cyberattacks, protects officials from assassination during wartime, and preserves public morale.
But Sarafraz rejected the government’s main justifications. He argued that some of the most severe cyberattacks on the country have occurred during Internet shutdowns. The official also said the Internet had failed to prevent the assassinations of scores of officials by the United States and Israel during the current conflict.
Sarafraz rejected that the Internet shutdown was safeguarding public morale. Prolonged digital isolation — compounded by unequal access policies such as “white Internet” access for regime-connected individuals and commercial “Internet Pro” services for wealthier users — had inflicted more psychological harm on Iranians than the potential negative impact of foreign online content, he said.
Can The Chinese Model Work In Iran?
Iran’s Deputy Communications Minister Ehsan Chitsaz said during a May 9 news conference that replicating China’s fully domestic Internet model was “in no way feasible” for Iran.
China’s system, he said, depends on a population exceeding 1 billion people and a vast internal digital market that Iran cannot replicate. Chitsaz also warned that prolonged Internet shutdowns themselves constitute a national-security threat.
Amir Rashidi, director of Internet security and digital rights at the Miaan Group, a US-based digital security organization focused on Iran, said Tehran’s system is much simpler compared to China.
Instead of building a massive system at enormous financial and technological cost over decades, he said, Iran is adding restrictions to existing Internet infrastructure.
That, Rashidi said, makes it cheaper and easier for other authoritarian governments to copy Iran.
“They can take this and implement Iran’s shutdown and censorship system” without rebuilding their networks from scratch, Rashidi RFE/RL’s Radio Farda.
Network researcher Aryan Eqbal said those in favor of Internet controls in Iran assume that China’s economic rise validates Beijing’s model of digital restrictions.
“China did not advance because of its closed Internet,” Eqbal told the Iranian technology news website Zoomit. “There were other reasons, and the closure has in fact had a negative effect on its progress.”
Iranian advocates of tighter controls, Eqbal said, seek to replicate only the coercive layer of China’s system while lacking the economic foundations that allow Beijing to absorb its costs.
Under international sanctions and weakened by decades of economic mismanagement, Iran’s economy is nowhere near the scale required for such a model to function sustainably, he said.
The economic toll of Iran’s blackout has been significant.
Afshin Kolahi, an official from Iran’s Chamber of Commerce, said during an April 12 session that the shutdown was costing the country up to $40 million per day. Indirect losses, he said, were up to $80 million each day as of mid-April.
