Why Iran is building their own internet

Summary

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If You're Listening – "Why Iran is building their own internet"

Host: Matt Bevan (ABC Australia)
Guest: Amin Naini, PhD candidate, Deakin University
Date: March 23, 2026

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Episode Overview

This episode delves into Iran’s ongoing efforts to control and isolate its national internet infrastructure, especially amidst renewed political unrest and state-imposed internet blackouts. Host Matt Bevan interviews Amin Naini, an Iranian researcher who offers firsthand insight into life during shutdowns, the regime’s digital control strategies, and the broader implications for information and security in Iran.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Current Situation: Internet Blackouts in Iran

• Frequent shutdowns: Iran has recently shut down public internet access, making it difficult for both outsiders and Iranians to know what's happening on the ground.

• Government perspective: Iranian officials claim this is necessary for "security reasons," citing national security, foreign aggression, and the need to protect the people ([01:37]).

  "Internet is closed because of security reasons, because we are under attack. We are under aggression, and we have to do everything to protect our people."
  — Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Arakchi ([01:37])

2. The Evolution of Internet Access in Iran

• Earlier days: In the early 2000s, internet access in Iran, particularly in major cities, was relatively open and free.

• Shift to control: After the 2009 protests, the government realized the organizational power of the internet and began investing heavily in infrastructure for digital control ([02:46]-[03:16]).

  "People in major cities such as Tehran used Facebook and Twitter to organize their protests, to promote their own narratives. They warned the government by their activities in cyberspace that there is a new public sphere."
  — Amin Naini ([04:30])

3. The 2009 Turning Point and Supreme Council of Cyberspace

• 2009 Green Movement: Protests over disputed election results fueled mass unrest, organized in part via social media.

• Government's response: The rapid suppression of protests was coupled by a crackdown on the internet—blocking Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, and forming the Supreme Council of Cyberspace in 2012.

  "For example, just three years later, in 2012, former supreme leader Ali Khamenei ordered the creation of Supreme Council of Cyberspace, basically creating government agendas for digital control."
  — Amin Naini ([05:46])

• Objective: To build a National Information Network—a local internet infrastructure, isolated from the global network and tightly monitored.

  "The main objective has been developing a national Internet, which is known in Iran as a national information network. This system is designed to separate Iran's Internet [from] the global network so people can have access to local platforms, but no international access."
  — Amin Naini ([06:54])

4. How Iran’s National Internet Works

• Selective connectivity: The national internet allows access to government-approved platforms and services (e.g., banking), even during blackouts.

• Global vs. local: External services like Google are blocked. During a blackout, only internal services run; international communication collapses.

  "In Iran we have two types of Internet now… people have access to that national Internet… [but] they cannot connect to people outside of the country and they know that their activities are monitored."
  — Amin Naini ([08:30])

5. Influence and Collaboration from China and Russia

• Borrowed blueprints: Iran models its digital control on China’s Great Firewall and Russia’s isolated systems.

• Official collaborations: Long-term Iran–China agreements reportedly include support for Iran's internet project.

  "China is a superpower in digital control. They definitely provide support for the Iranian government."
  — Amin Naini ([09:54])

6. Life Under Internet Blackout

• Everyday impacts: Most citizens lose access to the world and each other. Young people continuously hunt for functional VPNs; many anticipate shutdowns during any national crisis ([11:13]).

  "It has become a pattern in Iran that people know that every major crisis that happens, the first thing that the government does is Internet shutdown."
  — Amin Naini ([11:26])

• Coping mechanisms:

  • VPNs: Most VPNs are quickly detected and blocked.
  • Starlink: A small, wealthy minority may use Starlink satellite kits, but they're expensive and possession is punishable ([12:40]).

  "The only available tool is Starlink. But the issue is that very few people in Iran have access to Starlink because Starlink kits are very expensive… if government finds that you have [it], you will be punished legally."
  — Amin Naini ([12:40])

7. Iran's Offensive Cyber Capabilities

• Active in cyberspace: Iran uses cyberattacks and online disinformation campaigns both regionally and globally, targeting infrastructure, sensitive sectors, and democratic trust abroad ([13:37]).

  "Offensive cyber strategy has become a very important part of Iran's strategy towards its enemies. Cyber attacks to target infrastructures… and also using online campaigns, disinformation campaigns to erode trust in democratic countries…"
  — Amin Naini ([13:37])

8. The Future: National Internet Completion & Prospects for Connectivity

• Completion status: Iran's national internet is only about 60% complete, with plans to continue developing for at least another 5–10 years.

• Prospects for open internet: Restoration is unlikely before the end of ongoing conflicts, and likely to be delayed even after.

  "It's very unlikely to see they will restore Internet connection during the war… even after the war, for a few days or maybe weeks, they don't do that because… they perceive it as a threat."
  — Amin Naini ([14:31])

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• "The Supreme Council of Cyberspace—sounds like something out of Star Trek."
  — Matt Bevan ([06:44])

• "It's hard to describe that situation to someone outside Iran… For the first day of this recent round of Internet shutdown, I received messages from my friends that they said, 'oh, we are waiting to see when we are disconnected.'"
  — Amin Naini ([11:13])

• "We're doing that ourselves." (on the need for state-driven disinformation campaigns to erode trust in democracies)
  — Matt Bevan, displaying sardonic wit ([14:18])

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Key Timestamps

• [01:28] – Interview with Iran’s Foreign Minister: rationale behind internet restriction
• [02:46] – Early internet freedom in Iran and the pivotal 2009 protests
• [05:46] – Establishment of the Supreme Council of Cyberspace
• [06:54] – Goals of the National Information Network
• [09:54] – Collaboration with China and Russia
• [11:13] – Amin describes life during an internet blackout
• [12:40] – Coping strategies: VPNs and Starlink
• [13:37] – Iran’s cyberattack and disinformation strategies
• [14:31] – Predictions about the duration and future of the blackout
• [15:03] – Status of national internet completion

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Episode Tone

The conversation blends sobering analysis with moments of dry humor and empathy, effectively underscoring both the real-world consequences of authoritarian digital control and the adaptability (and occasional despair) of ordinary Iranians.

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In Closing

This episode offers an incisive look at how Iran is engineering its own digital iron curtain, drawing lessons from international authoritarian regimes, and deepening state surveillance and control for both political survival and cyber warfare. For listeners, Amin Naini’s direct testimony grounds this complex geopolitical story in daily reality—marked by frustration, ingenuity, and uncertainty for millions of Iranians.

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Next episode preview:
Matt teases an upcoming discussion on the Strait of Hormuz and why alternative trade routes were never constructed, despite ongoing global tensions.

Transcript

[A]

ABC Listen, podcasts, radio, news, music and more.

[B]

I'm Carrington Clarke.

[A]

And I'm Alan Koehler.

[B]

In 2026, business big and small is moving at a rapid pace. And ABC Business Daily is here to help you cut through the noise and spin. Monday to Thursday.

[A]

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[C]

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[A]

Because that's business.

[B]

All in the ABC Business Daily feed on ABC Listen or wherever you get your podcasts. This podcast was produced on the lands of the Awabakal and Gadigal people. G'. Day. I'm Matt Bevan. This is. If you're listening to no one's surprise, we're sticking on the topic of Iran at the moment. Later this week, we're going to be returning to the issue at the Strait of Hormuz and looking at some of strange solutions that people have come up with. But as we've been looking into Iran over this month, we've had a lot of trouble finding out what's really happening on the ground in the country. And aside from the usual fog of war that's due to concerted and deliberate Internet shutdowns carried out by the Iranian regime last week, the Iranian foreign minister, Abbas Arakchi, was asked about the situation during an interview with Face the Nation on cbs.

[A]

I just do want to point out you're speaking to us via Zoom. The Iranian people don't have open Internet access, but you do. Why?

[B]

Because I'm the voice of Iranians and I have to defend their right. But Internet is closed because of the security reasons, because we are under the under attack. We are under aggression, and we have to do everything to protect our people. In any country, there are, you know, urgent measures taken for this for the sake of war. This isn't the first time the Internet has been shut down for Iranian users. It's happened many times before. Amin Naini is a PhD candidate at Deakin University who has spent years researching Iran's system of digital control. And he's Iranian himself and has experienced these shutdowns firsthand. Amin, thanks so much for joining me.

[A]

Thank you. Great to meet you, too.

[B]

I mean, I am 36 and my teenage years were dominated by the Internet. I think that was the case for most Western millennials. What was Internet access like for you growing up in Iran? Was it as all encompassing as, as it was for us in the West?

[A]

Yeah, the same Internet expanded in Iran mostly, of course, in major cities in first years. We can say that it was free. People had access to many platforms at that time, but the government invested in its digital control step by step, year by year.

[B]

So that all kind of started around 2009. There was big protests in Iran that we heard about all around the world.

[C]

It's been 30 years since Iran has seen protests like this. The same anger that deposed the Shah is once again driving Iranian people to the streets to protest against the regime that replaced him.

[B]

The Internet played a big role in helping the organisers of those protests to organise them. Can you tell me about the protests and then tell me about the government response?

[A]

Yeah. In fact, it was the turning point. In Iranian societies

[C]

for three decades, gatherings like this have been banned and crushed. This time, the momentum is just too great. In a campaign that had been driven by modern communications, the story was always going to get out.

[A]

So for the first time after the 1979 revolution, many people took to the streets because they believe election fraud, when President Ahmadinejad was re elected, that this result has been manipulated. So they took to the streets with slogans such as, where is my vote? At that time, people in major cities such as Tehran used Facebook and Twitter to organize their protests, to promote their own narratives. And basically they warned the government by their activities in cyberspace that there is a new public sphere, there is a new space that people can use beyond your absolute control in the physical world.

[B]

And of course, Iran had control over the broadcast media and that kind of thing as well. So this was a departure from that and allowed a lot of people to gain a big platform that otherwise would have been prevented from doing so. Is that right?

[A]

Yeah, yeah. It was quite new phenomenon in Iran, because radio and TV stations are state owned and newspapers are all affiliated with regime institutions, or if there are some independent newspapers, they are fully monitored and they have been monitored since the early months after Revolution 1997.

[B]

How did the regime react to this? They obviously instituted a crackdown against the protests. There was violence from the Islamic Revolutionary Guard cause, Basji Group. What did they take away from it in terms of a lesson about the Internet?

[A]

Very quickly they suppress protests in the streets, but more importantly, they learned that they need to invest more and more in digital control. First of all, rapidly they blocked social media platforms, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube. But beyond that, the regime started working on sophisticated systems of control. And for example, just three years later, in 2012, former supreme leader Ali Khamenei ordered the creation of Supreme Council of Cyberspace, basically creating government agendas for digital control. The head of this council is the president. Other members are the Commander in Chief of the irgc, speaker of Parliament, head of Judiciary, Minister of Intelligence. These high ranking persons.

[B]

The Supreme Council of Cyberspace. Sounds like something out of Star Trek. Yeah, it is a very grand name. What was their aim? What were they trying to figure out how to do?

[A]

The main objective has been developing a national Internet, which is known in Iran as a national information network. This system is designed to separate Iran's Internet to global network so people can have access to local platforms, but no international access. Even basic services such as Google is not available. When the first time it was in 2019 that the regime tested its national Internet because at that time again the country witnessed a new round of protests. They shut down Internet for a week. The government was able to run its own services such as banking systems and other websites affiliated to the regime and their own digital infrastructures. People didn't have access to international Internet.

[B]

I think that's an important point to make because I think people would think an Internet blackout would involve just switching off all of the Internet infrastructure. But that would of course mean the Internet goes off for everyone, including the government, including the banking system, including traffic control systems, including everything. And so they specifically figured out a way to open, isolate obviously those very important systems from the rest of the general Internet and figured out a way to just switch off the things that they wanted to suppress.

[A]

That's the difference. As you said, we have had Internet shutdown in different countries, for example in Africa, but at that time it is completely shut down. But in Iran we have two types of Internet now and people have access to that national Internet even these days. They can even join local messengers or social media that Iran have created, but they cannot connect to people outside of the country and they know that their activities are monitored. So it's hard to call it as

[B]

an Internet, the Iran ternet. There's something there. I can't quite figure it out. But at this time in the 2010s, we saw other countries doing similar things. Of course, the Great Firewall of China. China has many of its own similar social media networks, video platforms. Russia is similar too. Russia has many of its own systems that are isolated from the rest of the world. Russia, I discovered a few years ago, has their own version of Google Maps which doesn't have any international borders on it because apparently international borders are not a big deal to Vladimir Putin at least. So did Iran collaborate with any of those other countries, get help from those other countries in designing this system?

[A]

Yeah, we have had reports of cooperation between Iran with China and Russia, of course, China is a superpower in digital control. They definitely provide support for the Iranian government. You know, in 2021, Iran and China signed a 25 year partnership. And details of this agreement have not released publicly, but we have had reports from Iranian media. It seems China is in charge to help the Iranian government to advance its national Internet. It's also about diffusion of digital control. Just how Iran learns from experience of China or Russia, as you said, creating national platforms similar to YouTube, to Twitter. China has done its before. So Iran learns that this is a good idea, we can do the same.

[B]

You mentioned that there was a blackout in 2009, there was a blackout in 2019. We are now obviously seeing another blackout which has been going on for three weeks. You've lived through these blackouts before. What is it like when the Internet is off? What is life like?

[A]

It's hard to describe that situation to someone outside Iran, to someone that has never experienced that.

[B]

Well, look, my wi fi goes out sometimes. Amin and I use it like that.

[A]

You know, some people, especially younger generations, spend a lot of time using several VPNs trying to find maybe one VPN can work for a few minutes. But for many people, in fact, it's very hard. And for the first day of this recent round of Internet shutdown, I received messages from my friends that they said, oh, we are waiting to see when we are disconnected, so we don't know how long we can stay connected. It has become a pattern, in fact in Iran that people know that every major crisis that happens, the first thing that the government does is Internet shutdown.

[B]

It must be so frustrating because of course for most people, the second that a crisis happens, the first thing they do is they go on the Internet to find out what it's about.

[A]

Yeah, normally people have around two hours to be disconnected.

[B]

People have been finding ways to get around this. Can you tell me about how they're doing that? If VPNs the normal way that people would access the global Internet during a blackout like this aren't as effective as usual.

[A]

Very few VPNs can work. And also the system looks for those VPNs to target them. So even if a VPN works now, maybe it can work a few hours later or a few minutes later in some cases. So in this condition, the only available tool is Starlink. But the issue is that very few people in Iran have access to Starlink because Starlink kits are very expensive in Iran and if government finds that you have a selling, you will be punished legally.

[B]

It's interesting that you're talking about that they want the ability to cut themselves off from the global Internet to prevent international threats or information they don't like coming into the country or cyber attacks coming into the country, that kind of thing. But at the same time, can you tell me a bit about Iran's cyber attack capabilities?

[A]

Over the past two decades, offensive cyber strategy has become a very important part of Iran's strategy towards its enemies. Cyber attacks to target infrastructures to steal information, for example, in critical technology sectors. And also using online campaigns, disinformation campaigns to erode trust in democratic countries, for example, the us, the uk, even Australia, to escort them, to not believe in their own institutions, in their own political systems.

[B]

They needn't bother. We're doing that ourselves. Do you see any circumstance where they will reopen the Internet while this war is underway? Or is it basically going to be a blackout for the foreseeable future, do you think?

[A]

It's very unlikely to see they will restore Internet connection during the war. It is more likely that even after the war, for a few days or maybe weeks, they don't do that because after the war, the fear of unrest in the country, they perceive it as a threat. So maybe a few days or weeks after the end of the war, have

[B]

they completed their project to try and set up their own national Internet? Is that fully functioning yet?

[A]

They say that no, it's not completed. 60% progress. It is something that needs at least five to even 10 years. They spent two decades to reach here.

[B]

Presumably you have family and friends and connections back home. Have you been able to get in touch with them and see how they're doing through this really terrifying time?

[A]

A friend. Yeah, a friend has been able to send a message. That's it.

[B]

Well, it's a terrifying time for the people of Iran and even more terrifying given they are struggling to get information in and out. Amin, thank you so much for speaking to us.

[A]

Thank you.

[B]

In our next episode, we'll be looking at the Strait of Hormuz and why, despite lots of proposed plans to build pipes bypassing this obvious choke point in global trade, nobody ever bothered to build them. Why? We'll find out then. Sam.