The Ministry of Communications and Information Technology issued a statement Tuesday saying the alleged interview with Communications Minister Reza Taqipur published April Fools Day was in fact a hoax.
The hoax report quoted Taqipur as saying Iran would from August launch a “clean Internet” that would block popular services like Google and Hotmail and replace them with government-sponsored search engines and e-mail services.
Officials have been saying for many months that the long delayed national intranet or “clean Internet” would provide email service and a search engine—but they have always denied the new service would cut off access to the outside world and to the Internet.
However, the government has never been explicit in describing just what its new service will do and how existing foreign services will be impacted. All the many statements have been vague and lacking in detail.
The ministry statement slammed the false report as serving “the propaganda wing of the West and providing its hostile media with a pretext emanating from a baseless claim.”
Iran currently censors millions of websites deemed un-Islamic, and has from time to time imposed temporary additional restrictions. The last time it did so—just before planned anti-regime protests in February—email services such as Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo were cut or slowed to an unusable speed for Iran’s 33 million web users.
The belief is widespread that the Islamic Republic intends its new service to replace and supplant the Internet because the regime so clearly dislikes Iranians having easy access to the outside world and few can figure out what purpose would be served and what value would be added by a new “national information network” that simply operated side-by-side with the existing Internet.