From stealth blackout to whitelisting: Inside the Iranian shutdown

As an Iranian in Iran who is now connected, I have a request: Please tell google make colab available behind the safe browsing IP. Google's safe browsing IP is usually the #1 whitelisted IP in internet blackouts. Having colab on this IP allows tech people to ssh into their servers, and bootstrap connections based on the available protocols at the time.

> To mitigate the costs of its shutdown, the Iranian government has created an internal national internet and appears to be in the process of building a “whitelisting” system to allow certain individuals and services internet access while blocking the rest. If these measures successfully enable an unpopular Iranian government to remain in power, we can expect to see them replicated elsewhere.

Another emerging country to watch out for is India. Sliding democracy by suppressing any form for free speech in main stream media and overwhelming propaganda on social media that drowns genuine critics is very chilling.

There has been much prognostication about the internet blackout but it misses the real issue. The internet blackout only works perfectly when there are no media backed journalists on the ground. The absolute absence of any reporting from foreign journalists on the ground anywhere in Iran is striking.

There was even some reporting from Tiananmen Square in 1989, and from Baghdad in 1991.

News media has ceased to be a meaningful investigative endeavor.

> Had authorities withdrawn IPv4 routes, as they did with IPv6, Iran would have become completely unreachable, as Egypt was in January 2011. By keeping IPv4 routes in circulation, Iranian authorities can selectively grant full internet access to specific users while denying it to the broader population.

As of late, we’ve seen a few measures like the restoration of transit from Rostelecom and the return of routes originated by IPM, as the country appears to be moving towards a partial restoration. At the time of this writing, the plan appears to be to operate the Iranian internet as a whitelisted network indefinitely.

I’d call that digital apartheid.

Today, the internet in Iran returned to normal. Other things had already gone back to normal a week ago. Now go deal with your own problems and tell your dishonorable governments this: We don’t expect any good from you—just don’t do us any harm! Reason: experience.

Iran has been rolling out the National Information Network (essentially a whitelisted internet) for a couple years now after the Green Revolution [0].

Iran has a surprisingly robust domestic ecosystem of hyperscalers [1] and telco infra [6][7] built out over the past decade with limited outside involvement and a severe sanctions regime, and have even started exporting Iranian IT services to Uganda [2], Kenya [3], South Africa [4], Venezuela [5], Russia [9], and China [9]

My understanding is that during the current 5 year plan in Iran, they are trying to fully transition the Iranian internet to the NIN, as all ".ir" domains are supposed to be hosted on the NIN.

If someone wants to find a techno-authoritarian state I'd say Iran is probably closer to that vision than most other countries, as a large portion of their leadership are Western-educated (Stanford, MIT, UPMC/Paris VI, Supélec, UNSW, etc) Computer Engineers and Computer Scientists by training (eg. Iran's VP did his PhD under Thomas Cover at Stanford [8] and Rouhani's Chief of Staff studied EE@SJSU). Even Iran's NSC and former IRGC head (who's daughter is a surgeon at Emory - so much for marg bar amreeka) was a CS major turned Kantian philosophy PhD.

[0] - https://citizenlab.ca/irans-national-information-network/

[1] - https://www.arvancloud.ir/fa

[2] - https://tvbrics.com/en/news/uganda-and-iran-to-boost-ict-co-...

[3] - https://mail.techreviewafrica.com/public/news/1361/kenya-and...

[4] - https://www.samenacouncil.org/samena_daily_news?news=64545

[5] - https://www.presstv.ir/Detail/2025/08/06/752585/Iranian-fibe...

[6] - https://zmc.co.ir/

[7] - https://www.rayafiber.com/en/home

[8] - https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/1011657

[9] - https://www.kharon.com/brief/iran-sanctions-maximum-pressure...

A friend of mine (from Iran) managed to send me a few messages on January 18th via Telegram (Telegram is very popular in Iran) when the situation was though to be resolving and then nothing, blackout again.

And even when the blackout was not present, my friend had to used some complex V2Ray server (in Iran) to another server (in Germany) to connect and it was shared by other people, so if he cannot connect probably 99% of other people in his area cannot also connect outside.

"The theocratic regime’s decision to restrict communications coincided with a violent nationwide crackdown on a growing protest movement driven by worsening economic hardship."

Right. Because MI-6, Mossad, and the CIA isn't worth mentioning here. whistles kicks some pebbles on the ground furtively looks around

The heavily censored truth about Iran: were there not western sanctions, the motive of which are much more related to "good old" western imperialism than to "national security" concerns, there would not be the violence seen today.

The west complains about lgbtx[..] executions but did not care a bit about the million dead, or how many there were, in the Iran-Iraq war fomented by the west, neither they care about what the majority of pepple of Iran wants (I very much doubt they want the return of Pehlewi family).

The west has more and more blood on its hands. Ukraine war (would never happen if the west would not use their nationalists for the west's aggression against the Russian people), Iran, and so many others.

Do you understand how much you are hated everywhere?

Perhaps next time brave Persian people will figure a way to do all of it without internet, as it turned the weakest point of the whole effort.

Very tangentially (For those prone to normie-sniping :)

https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2026/1/19/in-iran-the-us-...