The Entire Country Of Iran Will Disconnect From The Internet This Summer
What if you woke up tomorrow and there was no Internet? Not “no Internet” like you forgot to pay the cable company and they shut off your high-speed connection. Not “not Internet” like your router broke and you no longer have Wi-Fi in your house. Not “not Internet” like you’re on the road all day without a mobile Internet connection. But, no Internet. No Google. No Yahoo. No Facebook. No Twitter. No Dr. Jay’s Live. Like, no Internet, for real. What would you do?
Well, one entire country is about to find out. And this isn’t some social experiment, either. Rather, the country of Iran is planning on completely doing away with the Internet this summer when they introduce a new National Intranet that will change the way that citizens of Iran stay connected. They’ll no longer be able to access any of the popular sites listed above. All of those sites like Google and Yahoo will be blocked. Instead, they’ll be able to log on to government-approved search engines and they’ll be required to register for new emails using their national identification. It’s all part of Iran’s plan to introduce a “Clean Internet” to the citizens of the country. And, it makes the censorship that goes on in other countries like China look incredibly tame.
To us, this seems like a terrible idea. We understand why Iranian officials want do it—they want to limit to amount of information that their citizens can get—but we don’t know how an entire country will be able to function without the Internet in 2012. Can you imagine all of the stuff that Iranians won’t know simply because they can’t read anything but government-sanctioned sites? Then again, that’s part of the reason why the government wants to cut off the country’s access to the Internet in the first place.
All we’re saying is that we don’t know how the country is going to be able to function productively without it. If we woke up tomorrow and there was no Internet—like, really, no Internet—we’d struggle to survive. For better or worse, it’s become that important to us. So, it’ll be interesting to see how Iranians respond to the drastic change.
