Iran blocked access to Google’s popular and relatively
secure Gmail service on Monday amid first steps by the Islamic republic to
establish a walled-off national intranet separate from the worldwide Internet.
Access to Google’s search page was
also restricted to its unsecured version, web users in Iran found. Attempts to
access it using a secure protocol were also blocked, SAPA and Agence France
Presse reported.
The curbs were announced in a
cellphone text message quoting Abdolsamad Khoramabadi, an adviser to Iran’s
public prosecutor’s office and the secretary of an official group tasked with
detecting Internet content deemed illegal.
“Due to the repeated demands of the
people, Google and Gmail will be filtered nationwide. They will remain filtered
until further notice,” the message read.
Google’s own website tracking
country-by-country access to its services did not immediately reflect the
blocks.
But several residents in Tehran told
AFP they were unable to get into their Gmail accounts unless they used VPN
(virtual private network) software.
VPNs are commonly used by tech-savvy
Iranians to get around extensive online censorship, though bandwidth of
connections through the software is routinely strangled and occasionally even
cut entirely.
Gmail is used by many Iranian
businessmen to communicate and exchange documents with foreign companies.
Iran’s economy is suffering under Western sanctions that have cut oil exports
and made trade more difficult.
Iranian authorities previously and
temporarily cut access to Google and Gmail in February, ahead of March
parliamentary elections.
Google’s popular YouTube video-sharing
site has been continually censored since mid-2009, following protests and
opposition claims of vote fraud in the wake of elections that returned
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to power.
Other social networking sites, such
as Facebook and Twitter, are also routinely blocked.
Iran is working on rolling out its
national intranet that it says will be clean of un-Islamic content. Officials
claim it will be faster and more secure, even though users’ data will be more
easily subject to monitoring.
Despite fears by Iranians that the
new intranet would supplant the Internet, Mohammad Soleimani, a lawmaker
heading a parliamentary communication committee, was quoted this week by the
ISNA news agency as saying that “the establishment of the ‘National Internet’
will not cut access to the Internet.”
He added, “Cutting access to the
Internet is not possible at all, because it would amount to imposing sanctions
on ourselves, which would not be logical. However, the filtering will remain in
place.”
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