controlled version of the Internet is far behind schedule.
Such an Iran-only Internet could leave citizens cut off from the rest of the world.
The National Internet Network project has been in the offing since 2005 and was supposed to have been launched by the end of last year. That did not happen.
The goal is a kind of giant intranet which would look like the internet, and perhaps offer faster response times within Iran, but would in fact be a separate system with restricted or no contact with the World Wide Web.
A limited test version of the network was launched in Qom province in January, and a similar pilot project is expected to get under way in Kerman province by the end of this year, according to Khashayar Nouri, a journalist based in Tehran writing for the Mianeh news service.
He says the plan now is to finish the Iranian web by the end of President Ahmadi-nejad’s term in 2013, although some doubt this deadline is realistic.
The National Internet Project was conceived in September 2005, the month after Ahmadi-nejad took office.
Nouri says it was originally calculated to cost almost $1 billion. The project ran into funding difficulties almost immediately. The Majlis refused to approve the $10 million budget needed to research the project, because legislators had little grasp of what it meant.
Nouri, however, says the government nonetheless spent more than $560 million through the end of 2009.
The godfather of the National Internet Network is Abdol-Majid Riyazi, who has served as deputy minister of information and communications technology throughout Ahmadi-nejad’s term of office. Before that, Riyazi was in upper management in the defense communication and electronics industries. Nouri says that left him convinced that having a separate Internet was key to avoiding prying American eyes.
As with all other countries, Iranian Internet traffic is routed through global networks that generally go through the United States. An email may travel around the world and across the United States before it reaches the inbox of the person sitting next to you. The same is true of websites with the .ir domain name.
Riyazi wants a system that will obviate this external traffic and the risks that poses.
In 2006, he told the Donya-ye Eqtesad newspaper, “The majority of Internet route servers are located in the US. Foreigners have [access to] all our information and can easily analyze it.”
Another argument in favor of an Iran-only web, Riyazi argues, is that it will make communications cheaper, allow for faster Internet speed through increased bandwidth – a major constraint in Iran at the moment – and ease online banking and e-commerce.
Officials say the main reason the Internet in Iran is slow now is heavy web content. In May, Saber Feyzi, the head of Iran’s national telecoms company told the Mehr news agency that visits to foreign websites were largely to blame for slowing the system down. At the same time, other officials say the bulk of visits are to Iranian websites rather than foreign ones.
While the authorities currently limit internet access for most users to a maximum speed of 128 kilobytes per second, they say the new Iranian network will allow of higher speeds. The average broadband speed in the United States is 6,200 kps, 48 times faster than in Iran. In other words, what someone in Chicago can download in 10 seconds takes eight minutes for someone in Tehran.
What Riyazi and other officials do not mention is that a national network would be much easier to control, and allow the authorities to monitor for undesirable content.
A former departmental head at the Telecommunications Ministry told Nouri this was the reason the government was backing the project. He said the network would place controls on users and cut them off from the outside world, with a “friendlier solution” than explicit restrictions.
On one crucial issue, the authorities have made no direct promises – whether users will be able to access the global Internet from their own system.
A communications expert in Iran sees the national Internet project as a major threat to the country’s citizens, which could turn society into an island separated from the rest of the world.
At the same time, this person was not depressed, as he doubted a hermetically sealed system as envisaged by the authorities can ever come to fruition.
“Given the Ahmadi-nejad Administration’s managerial methods, a project like this is going to be completed only with a lot of delays, and with much deviation from its original objectives,” he said.