Experts’ opinions regarding the infrastructure company’s claim about the end of internet disruptions.
According to IDEA: Two months have passed since the order of the President to the National Cyberspace Center to address internet slowness, yet this task remains unfulfilled. Meanwhile, the CEO of the Infrastructure Communications Company, relying on a report from two months ago by the E-Commerce Association, which had announced that the internet quality in the country is unsatisfactory and severe disruptions are observed in the network, claims that there are no longer disruptions in the country’s internet, and this matter has even been confirmed by this association. However, a follow-up by a reporter from ‘IDEA ‘ with the President of the Tehran E-Commerce Association indicates that only some of the internet restrictions have been lifted, and the network still has a long way to go to reach the desired state. Furthermore, in this regard, some network experts, in a conversation with ‘IDEA’, state that some limitations have been slightly removed, and based on experience, the resolution of some limitations is not always permanent and continuous.
The Constraint That Is and Isn’t
The CEO of the Infrastructure Communications Company stated on a native messaging platform that based on a test conducted on the infrastructure network in late August with the participation of the E-Commerce Association team, it has been determined that there is no disruption in the entire network, and both teams have agreed on this matter. On the other hand, according to Mohammad Jafarpour’s claim, while packet loss has been observed in the operator’s network, it has not been observed in the infrastructure and international network since the network’s core, and packet loss (which refers to data packets that don’t reach their destination when moving through the network) has not been observed. He also mentioned that in a test without limitations on the infrastructure network, a speed of 7 gigabits per second was recorded.
In contrast, Nima Ghazi, the President of the Tehran E-Commerce Association, emphasizes in an interview that although after the publication of the report by the association about the critical condition of the internet, they have received positive feedback from the Ministry of Communications and, in the past few weeks, have managed to reach good understandings about solving the country’s internet problems through various meetings, the internet network is still far from being in a desirable state. Ghazi, when asked whether these meetings have fully led to the removal of restrictions and internet disruptions, stated: “After the association’s report was published, we held various meetings with the Ministry of Communications. Three or four weeks after the publication of the report, we saw that some of the issues mentioned in the association’s report about restrictions on the network and internet protocols had been corrected. For example, the HTTP/3 protocol, which Cloudflare’s radar had shown was facing issues from Iranian internet operators, was fixed after a certain date, and now access to this protocol is possible.” Ghazi mentions that the opening of this protocol for websites that use it allows web pages to load 20 to 35 percent faster for users. He also announces that the reduction of disruptions between the internal and external network communications is another positive development that has occurred, and in this regard, he explains: “In the association’s report and based on the test we conducted on the traffic going back and forth between Iran and abroad (international), it was evident that there were severe disruptions in this area, but in the past two weeks, these disruptions have significantly decreased, and in fact, the packet loss that was indicated in our tests has now become very low.” Ghazi emphasizes that while some changes have been made in certain layers of the network, many other changes and actions need to be taken to get closer to the desired state. As he said, they are currently in the early stage of technical follow-up with the Ministry of Communications to eliminate access barriers to the internet without disruption. According to him, their efforts have not yet entered the intermediate and long-term actions.
Public Pressure or a Way to Reduce Costs?
In the same context, another group of technical experts emphasize that only a portion of internet restrictions have been lifted and a significant portion of disruptions persist on the network. For instance, Vahid Farid, an IT and communications technology activist, stressed in an interview that in the past four days, two internet restrictions have been lifted. According to him, the first restriction that was lifted was the opening of the HTTP/3 protocol. Additionally, according to his claim, limitations on Cloudflare IPs and domains have been reduced to some extent. As he explains, in the past few days, major Cloudflare domains provided services, such as worker.dev and pager.dev domains have been unblocked.
He discusses the importance of removing these small limitations and their impact on the end-user’s access to the internet: “Cloudflare is a major internet service provider, and 40 percent of the web traffic of top websites worldwide goes through Cloudflare. Thus, removing a few minor limitations from this service provider only leads to better services being provided to customers.” Farid also explains the impact of lifting the HTTP/3 protocol restriction on end-users: “The opening of the HTTP/3 protocol has also resulted in the elimination of several other limitations. For instance, a prerequisite for lifting restrictions on this protocol is that limitations on the UDP protocol should also be removed. This UDP protocol is, in fact, the primary protocol for many internet tunnels, including WireGuard, which is a popular tunnel for using various free circumvention tools.” According to him, the opening of just one protocol like HTTP/3 at least enables many free circumvention tools that had become inactive over the past year due to severe internet limitations and strict implementation of the filtering system to become operational again.
He mentions that apart from the two restrictions mentioned, other internet network limitations are still in place and even more severe than before. In response to the question of what could be the reason for this removal of small internet restrictions, Farid states: “I can’t give an exact reason for it, but perhaps the main reason is the damage that filtering has caused to businesses and operators. In the recent parliamentary report on the internet’s status, it was mentioned that 25 percent of the country’s internet traffic is unidentifiable. This is an indication of the failure of the filtering project. Alongside these damages, the pressure from activists and public opinion to minimize these limitations has also not been without influence.”
In his belief, decision-making officials may have realized that these restrictions haven’t helped them achieve their goals and have only increased costs. They might have concluded that after one more year, it’s time to gradually remove these limitations, even if just a little.
Ever-Changing Restrictions
While some experts view the reduction of certain internet limitations positively and even attribute the decrease in these restrictions and policy retreat to public pressure and the efforts of organizations like the Electronic Commerce Association, others believe that not only have extensive limitations not been removed, but these small relaxations might be due to authorities testing new methods for imposing fresh internet restrictions.
In this regard, Amin Shayan, a technical expert from one of the network infrastructure service companies, tells ‘The Economic World’ that no restrictions have been lifted yet. He argues that if any restrictions had been lifted, customers would have reacted to them. According to him, while a portion of the access issues to Cloudflare might have been temporarily resolved, these problems are likely to resurface tomorrow, and the situation isn’t such that the removal of these limitations will continue for a week or even a month. He states, “Minor openings might have occurred, but severe network problems persist, and the situation has not returned to the state it was a year and a half ago. It can be said that the lifting of restrictions would mean that the problems have been completely solved, and the network has stabilized.” According to him, the current network condition is such that today one restriction might be removed, but in return, a new limitation will be imposed on the network, which might be more challenging to bypass than the previous ones.”
According to this group of experts, based on the experience of the past year, one shouldn’t be overly optimistic about the removal of certain 24-hour internet restrictions. They suggest that decision-makers might be experimenting with new ways to introduce restrictions to the internet.
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