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Iran Blocks Broadband
What about a Made For Iran initiative?
The EU is not alone in looking at ways to regulate technology it doesn't approve of: Iran, too, hopes to stem dissenting voices, this time by taking the drastic step of banning high-speed internet connections.
The Guardian reports Iran has 5 million internet users. This worries the country's fundamentalist mullah leadership, who worry that these impressionable young minds are open to the evil influence of western culture. This, they says, "undermines Islamic culture" in young minds.
So they've ordered service providers to stop offering broadband services and restrict download speeds to 128 kilobytes a second.
This, they hope, will make the download of western music, video and television shows impossibly slow. It will also prevent dissident groups from uploading information at any speed.
Hundreds of Iran's academics have protested against the ban, complaining that it will hold up Iran's scientific and technological progress.
The ban follows a crackdown on satellite dishes, which were up to quite recently tolerated by the mullahs. Under the presidency of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, however, such innocent pleasures as watching MTV and trashy Euro-soaps have been banned. Newspapers believed to dissent from the government's strict Islamist line have been closed down, too.
Made for Iran
Iran's mullahs want to prevent the country's citizens from downloading western news and entertainment. Surely the international blogging and new media community can come up with a way round this: An aggregator of blog feeds designed for low connection speeds, perhaps? A way of compressing files to get round the broadband ban?
Let's see if blogging ingenuity can help beat the mullahs. Any takers? Post your thoughts in the comments section below.
