Iran's internet blackout may become permanent, with access for elites only

Comparisons with Western internet controls

• Many comments push back against framing Iran’s blackout as uniquely evil, citing EU website bans, UK age‑verification plans, Spanish ISP blocking of whole IP ranges during football, and French DNS blocks in New Caledonia protests.
• Others argue this equivalence is misleading: Western measures, while bad, are partial, reversible, and subject to courts, media, and elections; Iran is accused of mass killings of protesters and total cutoffs to prevent its overthrow.
• A recurring sub‑thread debates “degrees vs kind”: is arrest for a T‑shirt similar in nature (but lesser in degree) to “disappearing” people, or is it qualitatively different? Some warn that constant “everything is the same” rhetoric is itself a propaganda tactic and erodes useful distinctions.

Nature of the Iranian regime and protests

• Strong disagreement on whether Iran is a “republic with elections” or effectively a theocratic dictatorship dominated by a supreme leader and security organs.
• Claims of tens of thousands killed during recent crackdowns are cited; others emphasize Iran’s history of elections and welfare subsidies. These points are sharply contested, not resolved.
• Some call for foreign intervention or harsher sanctions; others counter that such moves often worsen outcomes and that overthrowing a heavily armed state is extremely hard.

Technical censorship and circumvention

• Iranian commenters describe: heavily degraded speeds, near‑total VPN/proxy blocking, sophisticated traffic analysis, and an unreliable, low‑quality national intranet. Circumvention now requires low‑fingerprint, protocol‑mimicking tunnels and constant method churn.
• Techniques mentioned: DNSTT and other pluggable transports, TLS‑in‑TLS obfuscation, traffic shaping, ShadowTLS/VLESS/Trojan variants, and Tor Snowflake; but authorities adapt quickly.
• Asynchronous/offline approaches are proposed: NNCP over sneakernet (USB), email over NNCP, SecureDrop to get material out, LoRa/mesh networks, and even reviving NNTP/UUCP‑style systems.
• Starlink was widely hoped for but appears degraded or jammed via RF/GPS interference; discussion notes that large‑scale jamming of satellite links is technically feasible, if not trivial.

Economy, elites, and “tiered internet”

• Several argue a permanent cutoff is plausible because Iran’s elite largely depend on oil revenues, not a vibrant digital economy, and already use uncensored SIMs or whitelisted access.
• Others note that even authoritarian states need some economic competence and connectivity to keep the military and key backers satisfied; too much isolation risks long‑term decay.
• There is concern that once a whitelist model is entrenched—full access for elites, tightly filtered or no internet for ordinary people—it will be very hard to reverse.