More than 82 days after Iran's government severed international internet access following a joint US-Israeli strike on 28 February, most Iranians remain cut off from global platforms. The shutdown has not only inflicted economic damage exceeding $1 billion but has also hardened into what critics describe as a digital class system, granting unfiltered access to senior officials and selected professionals while ordinary citizens pay exorbitant sums for unreliable connections.
Government spokesperson Fatemeh Mohajerani told reporters on Tuesday that the administration of President Masoud Pezeshkian opposes internet restrictions but could not provide a timeline for restoration. She said the government is working with the supreme leader's office and other authorities to 'untie the knots around the internet.' The admission underscores the tension between the government's stated principles and the security apparatus that controls the network.
Three tiers of access
At the top of the hierarchy is what Iranians call 'white internet' — unfiltered access long reserved for senior Islamic Republic officials and gradually extended during Hassan Rouhani's presidency to journalists whose names were submitted to the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance. Reza, a journalist in Tehran, said he has had white internet since 2018 and faced no disruption even during the complete shutdown of November 2019.
Mansour Beytaf, former editor-in-chief of the economic daily Taadol, said he refused to hand over his personal phone number to obtain the privilege. 'Free access to the internet is a public right. You cannot give that privilege to some and deny it to others. It is blatant discrimination,' he told Euronews.
Below white internet sits 'Internet Pro' — marketed as 'stable business internet' — which provides selected categories of users, including registered companies, journalists, lawyers, academics and medical professionals, with limited access to a capped list of international platforms, typically no more than 10. Access to Telegram and WhatsApp is generally stable, while Instagram, YouTube and X are unreliable. University lecturers are largely confined to academic databases and Google Scholar; doctors have access mainly to WhatsApp.
Internet Pro costs 40,000 tomans per gigabyte — roughly €0.20 at current exchange rates. Those without it are paying around 500,000 tomans per gigabyte for commercially available VPNs, more than 12 times as much. Alireza, a 40-year-old café owner in Tehran who does not qualify for Internet Pro, said he spends 15 million tomans — around €75 — a month to maintain 1 gigabyte of daily VPN access, a sharp reduction from the unlimited browsing he previously used for business. 'In which country does using the internet cost this much?' he asked. 'Just because there's a war on, should the Iranian people be deprived of the internet?'
Economic toll mounts
Abbas Ashtiani, head of the blockchain commission at the national IT guild organisation, told state agency IRNA in late April that the internet outages had inflicted around $1 billion (€862 million) in damage to Iran's digital economy over the first 50 days of the shutdown — including direct losses, lost profits and other harms. He put daily losses at between $30 million and $35 million (€26.8 million and €30 million).
Beytaf told Euronews that by mid-May, and without counting indirect losses, the shutdown had caused businesses 16.3 trillion tomans (€181 million at official market rates) in lost profits. Those hardest hit have been sellers who ran businesses on Instagram, WhatsApp and Telegram — many of them informal traders who do not qualify for Internet Pro and cannot afford VPN costs. Digikala, one of Iran's largest e-commerce platforms, has laid off staff due to reduced turnover.
Mohajerani said on Tuesday that Internet Pro was designed for businesses and was not intended as a general solution to internet shutdowns. She described the government's position as opposing all discrimination and regarding internet access as a right for all citizens. Critics have noted a contradiction at the centre of the government's position: Pezeshkian chairs both the government, which says it opposes discrimination, and the Supreme National Security Council, which approved the Internet Pro system.
The situation echoes broader patterns of internet control in the region, as seen in the Kremlin's tightening of online spaces. For Iranians, the blackout has deepened the divide between those with connections and those without, turning a wartime measure into a permanent feature of digital apartheid.
