Iran reinstates some internet access but restrictions remain for most

Tehran, Iran – Authorities in Iran have reinstated some internet access three months after taking the country offline at the start of the war with the United States and Israel, but restrictions remain in place for most people.

The Iranian government said last week that it had started a process to bring internet access back to a pre-war level, which was already very restricted as Iran was at the time still coming off an earlier 20-day shutdown imposed during deadly nationwide protests in January.

Last week’s move ended more than 2,000 hours of near-total internet shutdown in the country of 90 million people, the longest-ever nationwide blackout in the world.

But according to numerous user reports, local media accounts and expert analysis, Iranians’ free access to the global internet is far from restored.

Access to millions of web pages remains blocked by the state, and almost all global services and apps such as YouTube, Instagram, Telegram, WhatsApp, Facebook and Waze are closed off and are not under consideration for reinstatement.

Mobile, wireless and landline connections are slow and patchy, to varying degrees, while many local applications and services regularly malfunction or fail to load.

Some Google services work, while others don’t. On Microsoft Windows, system Wi-Fi keeps restarting due to internet disruptions. Gamers, for their part, have to contend with what’s known as “high ping”, causing lags and glitches in gameplay.

Most people are forced into a black market for access to the internet, which has proven lucrative for those selling virtual private networks (VPNs) or other circumvention methods, often through affiliations with the state.

Those connections have now become cheaper after the authorities restored some internet bandwidth, but demand for VPNs has skyrocketed, and people remain exposed to scammers and malware while navigating the market.

‘Architecture of filtering’

Meanwhile, even after the partial reopening, Iranian authorities continue to impose several complex layers of restrictions that have effectively turned full internet access into a privilege that very few people authorised by the state can enjoy.

Many data centres have yet to be fully brought back online, and some internet protocols like IPv6 and HTTP/3 are blocked, while others like UDP are actively disrupted by the authorities, local media reported.

An expert who spoke on background with Al Jazeera said many foreign IP addresses are currently not fully blocked but rather placed in a restricted “grey” middle state.

In practice, while those connections are allowed to begin, the traffic and the volume of data packets that the authorities have permitted people to use are extremely limited, causing poor connectivity.

If the connection is “whitelisted” to proceed by state authorities, however, there will be fewer or no restrictions.

That has prompted more criticism against Iran’s relatively moderate President Masoud Pezeshkian, who campaigned against hardliners, in part, on reopening the internet.

The Sazandegi reformist newspaper criticised the government over the “belated opening” in an op-ed on Saturday while the state-linked KhabarOnline news site wrote that the “Internet’s technical infrastructure is the victim of the new architecture of filtering”.

But the Pezeshkian administration is also under fire from hardliners who are in favour of maintaining the near-total shutdown.

Iranian media said several hardline members of the Supreme National Cybersecurity Council and other state bodies tried to impede the process by getting the Administrative Court of Justice to issue an order suspending the government entity that ordered the reopening.

Government spokeswoman Fatemeh Mohajerani was grilled on state television during a live interview on Sunday, with the host emphasising that the court order stands, so the process to restore the internet may not be legal.

‘This is not the internet’

Authorities have also failed to elaborate on what exactly they plan to do with the tiered-access internet system that they began expanding during the war.

As part of the system, Iranians get varying degrees of access – or no access at all – to the global internet based on their profession and other classifications made by the state.

To implement the scheme, a so-called “Internet Pro” scheme was introduced, which offers slightly less restricted access for about three times the price of a regular, more restricted internet package.

One user who obtained such a state-issued connection through a university affiliation told Al Jazeera that it was still active on Sunday, and that their telecoms provider has announced no plan to deactivate the services or offer refunds.

But the state-run Mobile Communications of Iran (MCI) quietly took down its advertisement and registry page for “Internet Pro” last week.

As uncertainty persists, the comment sections of state news sites continue to be filled with messages of anger and frustration over the continuing internet disruptions, which have hit businesses and workers hard in a tanking economy.

Still, more people have been able to get back on social media, where they have posted more videos from the war, including one that showed a new view as dozens of missiles rained down on the headquarters of Iran’s supreme leader in downtown Tehran on February 28.

Others are sharing war experiences, including where they were and how they felt when the first bombs hit the capital.

But that hasn’t alleviated the frustrations for many. “What we have right now is not the internet,” said a Tehran resident, who spoke to Al Jazeera on condition of anonymity. “It’s a return to the previous half-closed condition that is now being sold as an achievement.”