Companies will be forced to host their sites locally as well

May 14, 2012 11:20 GMT  ·  By

Iran has long been blocking plenty of foreign websites, the large US ones in particular. Google, Facebook, Twitter are all blocked either permanently or intermittently. Of course, as anyone with even the slightest tech-savviness will tell you, filters, even the most sophisticated ones, can be relatively easily bypassed.

Iran's filters are anything but sophisticated, so plenty of people have access to Gmail, YouTube, Facebook and so on if they want to.

But now Iran has come up with a very clever plan to go around the weakness of its own filters, force local companies to only service customers who provide a local email address and not a Gmail one, or anything else.

Companies are also banned from using any email service or even hosting service from outside the country.

Banks, insurance firms and telephone operators are covered by this new regulation. The sites of these companies must be hosted in Iran. Government sites are already being transitioned to local providers, a last update said 90 percent of these sites are now hosted internally.

What's more, government agencies can only use gov.ir. or .ir domain names for their sites. Universities must use either ac.ir or .ir as well.

Companies covered by the new regulation must only use post.ir, iran.ir or chmail.ir for their email system and, what's more, can only accept emails coming from these addresses.

All of this is part of Iran's plan to "transition" to a local and fully controlled internet. The government is said to be working on this, but there is no official confirmation.

However, the goal is to have all communications happening internally, outside the reach of foreign agencies and, even more importantly, fully in the hands of local ones.

The end result is that citizens will no longer be able to use any form of communications that is now listened to or filtered by the government. Thankfully, while attempts to control the population have existed since the dawn of civilization, none has worked perfectly, or forever.