Slashdot Mirror
In Censorship Move, Iran Plans Its Own Internet
An anonymous reader writes "Iran is taking steps toward an aggressive new form of censorship: a so-called national Internet that could, in effect, disconnect Iranian cyberspace from the rest of the world (summary of paywalled WSJ report). The leadership in Iran sees the project as a way to end the fight for control of the Internet, according to observers of Iranian policy inside and outside the country. Iran, already among the most sophisticated nations in online censoring, also promotes its national Internet as a cost-saving measure for consumers and as a way to uphold Islamic moral codes."
The article also mentions unconfirmed local press reports suggesting that Iran is building its own national operating system.
Iran certainly needs the outside world to buy its oil and sell some of it back as refined and distilled petroleum products, seeing as the military and the Ayatollahs, who now amount to little more than a theocratic face on the military dictatorship, have basically let Iran's infrastructure rot.
Their plan is moronic and would only further marginalize their crippled economy. At least China is run by sane despots. Iran is being increasingly run by idiots.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
They are being held down the old fashioned way, by fear. A man (or woman) will, no matter how much they want to see a regime brought down, think about their immediate family first and foremost, and as long as the regime can make the cost of a revolution in the blood of oneself and one's kin high enough, they can maintain the tyranny.
In reality, everything hinges on the army, and it's been that way in every state that has had a standing army, whether it be Rome, France, Russia, and so on. What wiped out the regimes in Tunisia and Egypt wasn't the uprisings. It was the armies of those two countries abandoning the leadership. You can ask a soldier to do a lot of things, but to ask him to open fire and his own people can be a risky thing for any regime.
Khomeini was a religious fanatic and monster, but he was also a very goddamned clever man. He reconstructed the Iranian army into two different groups, the regular armed forces on one hand and the Revolutionary Guard and Basij on the other. In other words he created a parallel military structure, with the Revolutionary Guard and Basij essentially the clerics' personal armed forces. So even if you had the kind of revolution that we've seen in Egypt or Tunisia, and the regular army decided to stay out of it, the clerics have a potent fist despite that, not to mention that the army is likely riddled with the Iranian Muslim version of "political officers" whose purpose to assure orthodoxy in the regular army units.
For a revolution to work in a modern state it requires the armed forces to either back it, or at least stay out of the way. Iran is a terrible situation where such a revolution would quickly evolve into a civil war. At least that's my opinion, any ways.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Iran "bans" satellite television, too. But everyone there has a dish, and they all saw Iron Man II before you did.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."