For most Iranians, the internet has effectively ceased to exist since the United States and Israel attacked Iran on February 28 - triggering what internet monitor NetBlocks described by April 5 as the longest nation-scale internet shutdown ever recorded. What has emerged in its place is not a restoration of access, but a rationing system that allocates connectivity by category, price, and apparent government approval - a structure critics are calling a deliberate transformation of a public resource into a paid privilege.
Amir-Hassan, a 39-year-old tech worker based in Iran, is among those who found themselves with a stark choice: pay for limited access through a government-linked "Pro Internet" service or remain cut off entirely. He paid roughly US$11 for an initial 50-gigabyte package. "It was out of necessity," he told AFP. "I was forced to get internet so I could ensure the flow of my income."
A Blackout Engineered for Control
The internet in Iran was already heavily restricted before the war. Years of sanctions, intermittent outages during protest movements, and systematic blocking of platforms including Instagram, X, and YouTube had long pushed Iranians toward virtual private networks as a basic tool of daily life. But the outbreak of hostilities in late February transformed a pattern of selective restriction into something far more total.
Under the current shutdown, most Iranians can access only a narrow band of local websites, state-approved applications, and banking services. The broader internet - the open, global web - has been severed. The "Pro Internet" scheme, offered to certain professionals and business owners via direct message invitation, partially restores access but stops well short of full connectivity. Subscribers to the service can reach WhatsApp and Telegram but remain blocked from other major international platforms without a VPN. Reports of inconsistent access among subscribers further suggest the service does not operate on uniform terms.
The rationale offered by authorities is national security. Government spokeswoman Fatemeh Mohajerani stated that the situation would normalize "once the shadow of war is gone," attributing the shutdown to security conditions created by Israel and the United States. The framing positions the blackout as a temporary and reactive measure rather than a deliberate instrument of social management - a characterisation that critics inside and outside Iran reject.
Paying for Unequal Access in a Collapsing Economy
The financial burden of the tiered system lands on a population already under severe economic stress. Iran's economy had been weakened by years of international sanctions before the war began. Since February, conditions have deteriorated sharply: inflation has surged above 50 percent in recent weeks, and the rial has lost much of its value against the dollar, pushing the prices of basic goods significantly higher. Against this backdrop, paying above-market rates for a fraction of normal internet access represents a meaningful sacrifice.
Mehdi, a 34-year-old graphic designer, purchased the service for professional reasons but was direct about its value: "The amount of data offered, in my view, is not economically worthwhile for users compared to the cost." Kaveh, a 38-year-old visual artist, declined to subscribe at all. He already pays separately for a VPN and said he would not pay additionally for "a little amount of freedom to some of us as a favour, at 10 times the normal price." His framing captures the wider sentiment: that the government is monetising the very restrictions it imposed.
Amir-Hassan made a similar observation. "This model of categorising and classifying the internet in Iran is not a good model," he said. "It is clearly meant to generate money." He also described a social cost alongside the financial one - being judged by others for paying into a system seen as illegitimate. "People say you went and put money into the pocket of a government that unfairly offers this."
Tiered Access as a Civic and Political Problem
The distribution of "Pro Internet" access has not followed consistent or transparent rules. Behrooz Mahmoodi-Bakhtiari, a linguistics professor at the University of Tehran, said he never received the invitation to subscribe, despite other colleagues having done so. His connectivity is reliable only while on university premises. "As soon as you step out of the university, you will again become a third-class citizen, and you have no internet access," he said.
The reformist Shargh daily newspaper, alongside other Iranian outlets, has published direct criticism of the arrangement, describing it as "tiered internet" and condemning "the transformation of the internet from a public and civic right into an allocable privilege." That language - civic right versus allocable privilege - frames the issue in terms that reach beyond telecommunications policy into questions of political legitimacy and equal treatment under the state.
Internationally, internet access during armed conflict has become a recognized dimension of humanitarian and human rights discourse. Prolonged shutdowns affect not only commerce and communication but access to emergency information, health services, legal support, and the ability to document events. A shutdown of the scale and duration now documented in Iran - the longest nation-scale blackout on record, according to NetBlocks - raises questions that extend well beyond any single government's wartime justification. When a state both imposes a total blackout and then sells partial restoration to selected citizens at elevated prices, the architecture of control becomes difficult to distinguish from the architecture of extraction.
