When the elections began, the citizens and voters in Iran were getting news reports from around the world via YouTube, Gmail and Google. That’s when Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his regime cut off their citizen’s access to the internet by enacting a ban on YouTube, Gmail and related websites. Purportedly, this was because these sites were presenting Western values and ideas to a people who receive on the most controlled news reports. The censorship of blocking several of these sites, leading to a massive 95% plus blockage to Gmail accounts has led some in Iran to bypass the government blocks through the use of private proxy servers.
A proxy server skirts around blocks and banned sites by receiving requests from the computer’s IP address and routing them through another server in a country that is not blocked or banned. The citizens of Iran who do not trust their government is growing by the day and that is evident from the number of new Iranians who buy proxy ip addresses almost on a daily basis.
In America these proxy servers are used to get around banned sites at the workplace or at a school. Many institutions ban social networks, pornographic sites and personal email accounts. Iranians have a more noble purpose for using them in getting around an oppressive government’s censorship of information to them.
Initially, the Iranian governments’ response as to why they were imposing the ban on YouTube involved the controversial video depicting the prophet Mohammed as a pedophile and a homosexual. The President of the United States echoed the call for an end to discrimination against Muslims but said that in America there is such a thing as free speech that protects one’s efforts to make such videos. Unfortunately for both Barack Hussein Obama and the Iranian government, the video in question had fewer than a few hundred hits on YouTube before the attack in Benghazi and the video was blamed for the protest that ended in the murder of four Americans.
Even though in Iran, less than half of the population even has access to the internet, the government imposed ban has caused a great deal of anger. Iran’s answer? They want to create a local version of Gmail, YouTube and Google as they put it an option that is both ‘clean’ and ‘national’.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
Leave your comment