Comment by baxtr

18 days ago

> Had authorities withdrawn IPv4 routes, as they did with IPv6, Iran would have become completely unreachable, as Egypt was in January 2011. By keeping IPv4 routes in circulation, Iranian authorities can selectively grant full internet access to specific users while denying it to the broader population.

As of late, we’ve seen a few measures like the restoration of transit from Rostelecom and the return of routes originated by IPM, as the country appears to be moving towards a partial restoration. At the time of this writing, the plan appears to be to operate the Iranian internet as a whitelisted network indefinitely.

I’d call that digital apartheid.

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baxtr

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breppp  18 days ago

Not going to defend the islamic republic with its massacres, but if there is no racial element there is no apartheid, no need to overload a precise term.

This is simply turning down methods of communications to reduce protestors ability to coordinate and enable mass killings

  • dominicrose  18 days ago

    Apartheid isn't only about race. It can be about genre. It obviously exists in Iran. There's also a long history of Persians vs Arabs, an weaponised islam.

  • baxtr  18 days ago

    I understand what you are saying and I was thinking about it when I wrote my comment.

    I still stand by the term. Apartheid literally means "apartness". Even though the segregation in this case is not on a racial basis they still classify their population into two major blocks. Some have full rights, others have none.

trhway  18 days ago

The Rostelecom mentioning isn't just an accident - in Russia they have been practicing whitelisting more and more by turning the Internet off, except for whitelisted sites, under the guise of safety measures during drone attacks (which is like almost every day/night), various high level visits, mass public events, etc.