Sunday, February 27, 2011

Iran, The Internet And Network Equipment

As tensions continue to escalate in Iran and with Iran and the rest of the world I couldn't help but thinking how a vibrant online world would work in Iran. After all, many technology products are banned from sale to Iran and they would need these products to have an online presence.

Interestingly, our company received an online inquiry about one month ago through our Live Chat feature from a person requesting to purchase some network equipment. I asked where he was located and where he wanted the equipment shipped. He said that he wanted the equipment shipped to Abu Dhabi. What he probably didn't know is that our plugin has the ability to reference the sender's location and his showed as Iran. When I confronted him (in my text back to him) about this he said he was a businessman who traveled and did business all over the Middle East and was at a business meeting in Iran and was contacting me while he had some free time.

This got me to thinking about how many banned products were shipped, knowingly or unknowingly, to "friendly" countries and then on-shipped with new documents to Iran. After all, I'm no international super sleuth but it doesn't seem possible to police the world against that many shipments that are neither scanned nor physically inspected at the point of shipment. Nor does it seem unlikely that these banned products could be carried by land through various routes to Iran.

With that said it seems like more of problem for users of network equipment once they get it into Iran. Censors in Iran literally block? thousands of websites, including Facebook and YouTube. Even with a large educated population that includes the Middle East's highest number of web surfers, last month Iran instituted an? Internet police unit to counter the growing popularity of web-based social networks. It is estimated that 32 million people of Iran's almost 74 million population are regular net surfers.

Internet restrictions, enforced by content-control software, are being used to block access to what the Iranian Government considers "immoral and destructive" material, which includes everything from pornography to news websites critical of Iran.

Network equipment and computer hardware experts claim that the monitoring and restricting of Internet access tightened after the controversial June 2009 Iranian presidential election, and has gotten even more restrictive with the flood of? Arab world uprisings beginning in Tunisia in December.

Iran, like some other countries that ignore intellectual property rights, has zero copyright laws. This allows pirated versions of movies, games and computer programs to become available in Iran within days of their release in the United States, and elsewhere. Plus they are sold at a fraction of their list or discount US sales price. As an example, an Adobe CS5 master collection sells for $2,359 on Amazon.com, yet it costs a only $5 in Iran.

To combat Internet censorship Iranians have adopted various solutions like free service Freegate and paid services using a Virtual Private Network (VPN).? Restrictions imposed by sanctions are not a problem for Iranian internet users. The real problem is internal government? filtering, and extremely slow download speeds.

The Iranian people seem to be quite adaptable to circumventing Internet restrictions. So, even a government shut down of ISPs (Internet Service Providers) might only spur its citizens to set up alternative methods to surf the net.

Hal Stevens
CEO


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