When bombs began falling on Iran in February, millions of Iranians lost something else almost as critical as shelter: the ability to know what was happening around them. Authorities shut down the nationwide internet for nearly three months, the longest blackout of its kind recorded anywhere, leaving people unable to reach relatives, check which neighborhoods were under threat, or find emergency medical guidance. That blackout now anchors Iran's standing as one of the worst environments for internet freedom in Freedom House's latest Freedom on the Net index.
A Deliberate Architecture of Isolation
The shutdown was not an isolated emergency measure. It was the visible peak of a longer campaign to re-engineer Iran's internet into a closed system controlled almost entirely by the state. Officials have spent recent years pushing citizens toward domestically licensed services while criminalizing unauthorized virtual private networks, the encrypted tunnels people use to bypass censorship and protect their traffic from surveillance. Since 2024, Iranians caught using unapproved VPNs have faced legal risk, while state-sanctioned alternatives give authorities a built-in vantage point to monitor and filter what citizens see. During the conflict, prices for both legal and black-market VPN access surged, with some Iranians reportedly paying sums equivalent to a fifth of an average monthly wage for a single gigabyte of data.
Russia is following a strikingly similar path. Moscow has throttled WhatsApp and Telegram while promoting Max, a messaging platform built by a government-aligned company and reportedly equipped with extensive surveillance capability. In September, Russian regulators introduced a formal whitelist of "socially significant services" that internet providers must keep accessible even during shutdowns - a list dominated by state media and Kremlin-friendly platforms. The intent is unmistakable: when connectivity breaks down, only state-approved channels survive.
Chasing China's Model, Without China's Infrastructure
Both governments appear to be chasing a version of China's Great Firewall, the dense system of filtering and surveillance built into Chinese networks from their inception. Iran and Russia lack that original architecture, so they are retrofitting censorship onto existing systems and leaning on coercion - fines, imprisonment, deliberately degraded service - to push citizens toward state-controlled alternatives. The appeal of these domestic platforms to authorities is straightforward: they comply with censorship orders and surveillance requests in ways that global platforms generally resist. Global social networks, whatever their flaws, still offer cross-border contact and a space to contest official narratives. A closed domestic internet eliminates that friction entirely.
What Can Still Get Through
The human cost of these shutdowns falls on ordinary citizens: separated families, disrupted businesses, and populations left vulnerable during crises precisely when information matters most. Circumvention tools remain part of the answer, though Iran has escalated penalties here too, threatening up to two years in prison for unlicensed satellite internet use introduced in October. Even so, satellite connectivity, emerging direct-to-cell technology, decentralized mesh networks, and open-source circumvention software all offer practical ways around government blockades.
Supporting these tools requires sustained investment. The Open Technology Fund, a U.S.-backed nonprofit operating within the U.S. Agency for Global Media, has long supported open-source anti-censorship technology used by people in Iran, Russia, and other restrictive states. As authoritarian governments refine their methods of digital isolation, expanding resources for this kind of infrastructure is less a technical choice than a democratic one - a bet that connectivity itself can outlast the walls built to contain it.
