The country’s plan for a nationwide intranet separated from the World Wide Web looks to be approaching fruition – what are the implications?

Not such a world wide web (Image: Newsha Tavakolian/Polaris/eyevine)

FOR years, Iranian officials have talked about creating a “halal” internet – a religiously acceptable internal network isolated from the World Wide Web. Its purpose, they claim, would be to provide national cybersecurity and promote Islamic moral values.

Collin Anderson – an independent security researcher in Washington DC – has found evidence that elements of this parallel internet now exist.

Until now there has been little sign of such a network, despite the Iranian government’s fifth Five-Year Development Plan in 2010 explicitly calling for its creation.


With the help of collaborators inside Iran, unnamed for security reasons, Anderson attempted to connect to computers inside the country. The telecommunications companies in Iran, they discovered, allocate two IP addresses to every machine that connects to the internet: a regular web address and an internal one that is only accessible from within Iran. This internal network had the capacity to handle about 17 million IP addresses. When the team attempted to contact all the possible addresses, they found that more than 10,000 devices are already part of the network. Most appeared to be using the kind of internet services used in private homes. Others were government or commerce sites. The network also contains a good deal of content, such as academic websites and email services.

Finally, the team found evidence that the routers that control internet traffic in and out of Iran are equipped to filter web pages (arxiv.org/abs/1209.6398).

The idea, Anderson thinks, is that the internal network will contain Iran-specific content and own-brand versions of popular services – a generic Facebook, say. The government would then throttle connections to outside networks, he suggests, rendering them unusably slow, forcing everyone onto the national network (see “Hey, censor, leave LOLcats alone“).

Many suspect that it would also be used by the government for social control; unregulated social media and other content likely to encourage dissent would simply not be available on Iran’s network.

Unregulated social media and other content likely to encourage dissent would simply not be available

The Iranian government’s track record suggests this is likely. Two weeks ago, Iran shut down Google services, including Gmail, in response to an anti-Islam YouTube video that has caused violent protests. But when ordinary citizens couldn’t access services they had come to rely on, they protested until the government relented and restored Gmail. To prevent such a backlash in the future, Iran would have to provide an alternative email system that can rival Gmail, says Ethan Zuckerman of Harvard University.

Iran has excellent software engineers, so doing this shouldn’t be a big problem. They may have trouble getting the hardware, though. Trade embargoes make it harder for Iran to import electronics, especially devices that can track or spy on people. Embargoes are hard to enforce, however: Chinese firms have sold such equipment to Iran before.

But if the halal internet is indeed about censorship, it’s unlikely to work. Iranians could still access the outside internet through the anonymising network Tor and virtual private networks. Presumably, Iran will not try to remove itself from the internet entirely: the government and military will need external access, for one thing. Resourceful citizens might be able to hack into these networks, too.

“It’s always a cat-and-mouse game,” says Zuckerman. The idea of an internal network has always failed. “There’s no reason to think it will succeed now.”