Iran so far unwilling to completely choke off ‘Net

Despite attempts to consolidate Internet traffic, the Iranian government has so far been unwilling to shut down its entire Internet infrastructure, according to analysis from security vendor Arbor Networks.

Looking at data culled from Arbor’s ATLAS 2.0 Internet monitoring system, Arbor chief scientist Craig Labovitz suggests that the Iranian government is trying to enact a “piecemeal migration of traffic flows” to better filter and censor traffic coming in and out of the country. However, Labovitz notes that so far the government has not completely shut down its entire network as the Burmese government did back in 2007.

“Unlike Burma, Iran has significant commercial and technological relationships with the rest of the world,” he says. “In other words, the government cannot turn off the Internet without impacting business and perhaps generating further social unrest.”

Labovitz says that before this week, Iranian networks would process Internet traffic at a rate of roughly 5Gbps. For a short time after the Iranian election finished last Friday, Iran’s networks went completely dark. Since then, however, Labovitz says that Iranian networks have start process Web traffic again at a greatly reduced rate, typically between 1 and 2Gbps. At 6:30 a.m. GMT on June 16, Arbor reports that Iranian traffic levels “returned to roughly 70% of normal.”

Labovitz says that Iran’s inability so far to shut down Web communications shows the difficulty that modern governments face in trying to censor information in the age of camera phones, YouTube and low-bandwidth mass communications systems such as Twitter. He says that Iran likely does not have the same kinds of sophisticated censorship tools as China, thus making it more difficult for them to quiet dissent without shutting down their entire network.

“This is a fascinating age, as countries are trying to walk the line between economic development and maintaining specific social and political policies,” he says. “Even so, you never know what will happen. I don’t know if this situation in Iran is indeed at a tipping point.”

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