When military strikes from the United States and Israel hit Iran in February, millions of Iranians found themselves unable to reach relatives, check on dangers nearby, or search for emergency medical guidance. Authorities had already cut most of the country off from the global internet, a blackout that stretched nearly three months and stands as the longest of its kind recorded anywhere. Freedom House's newly released Freedom on the Net index names Iran among the world's most hostile environments for internet freedom, a ranking the blackout helped cement.
A Deliberate Campaign, Not an Accident
The shutdown was not an isolated emergency measure. It formed part of a broader, sustained effort by Iranian authorities to reengineer the national internet so that it can be isolated from the rest of the world at will. Russia is pursuing a strikingly similar project. Both governments are working to confine their populations to domestic platforms that answer to state demands, while squeezing out global services that, whatever their flaws, allow information to cross borders and dissent to find an audience.
The ambition in both countries is to approximate China's Great Firewall, the censorship infrastructure that filters and monitors internet traffic at a national scale. China built that system into its network from the start. Russia and Iran face a harder task: retrofitting existing infrastructure and compelling citizens, often through coercion and inflated costs, to abandon tools they already rely on.
Squeezing Out Encrypted Tools and Global Platforms
Russian authorities have throttled WhatsApp and Telegram over the past year, degrading their speed to push users toward Max, a messaging platform built by VK, a company aligned with the government and reportedly equipped with extensive surveillance capability. A new "register of socially significant services," announced in September 2025, functions as a whitelist of sites that internet providers must keep accessible during shutdowns - a list dominated by state media and government-friendly platforms.
Iran has taken a parallel path with virtual private networks. VPNs encrypt a user's traffic and route it through remote servers, letting people reach blocked content and shield their activity from monitoring. In 2024, Iranian officials criminalized "unauthorized" VPN use, steering citizens toward state-licensed providers that give authorities an easier path to censorship and surveillance. During the recent conflict, prices for both state-approved and black-market VPN access surged; one Iranian reportedly paid roughly $20 for a single gigabyte of data, close to a fifth of an average monthly wage.
What Democracies Can Still Do
Satellite internet offers one avenue around government-imposed blackouts, though Iran responded by criminalizing unlicensed satellite access, with penalties reaching two years in prison. Emerging direct-to-cell satellite technology could eventually ease some of the physical constraints that limit satellite ground equipment. Decentralized mesh networks and circumvention tools designed to disguise VPN traffic as ordinary web activity also remain important, if imperfect, options.
The Open Technology Fund, a U.S.-backed nonprofit operating under the U.S. Agency for Global Media since 2011, supports many of the open-source anti-censorship tools used by people in Iran, Russia and China. Expanding investment in that fund would strengthen one of the few concrete mechanisms democracies have for keeping an open channel to populations under authoritarian information control.
Why the Stakes Extend Beyond Iran and Russia
The costs of digital isolation fall on ordinary citizens: severed contact with family abroad, disrupted commerce, and exposure to pervasive surveillance. For the governments imposing these restrictions, that suffering is a price worth paying to entrench political control. The outcome of this contest, over whether people in closed societies retain any independent window to the wider internet, will shape how effectively authoritarian states can insulate themselves from outside scrutiny and internal dissent alike.