Internet

When governments shut down the internet, the standard justification is security, and the standard assumption is that the measure is temporary. Iran has tested both of those assumptions to their breaking point. Its nationwide internet blackout is now the longest ever imposed on an entire population, and Iranian authorities have simultaneously passed legislation making possession of a satellite internet terminal a criminal offence punishable by execution. These two facts are not separate policies responding to separate pressures. They are expressions of a single, long-prepared doctrine of information sovereignty, one in which connectivity is not a public utility to be temporarily suspended but a political instrument to be permanently controlled.   What Iran has built, and what it is now operating at scale for the first time, raises a question that extends well beyond its borders: when a state decides that controlling information is worth more than the economic cost of losing it, and the international system has no answer, what happens next?