I was pointed at this by the inestimable Joe Carvalho:
Snippets:
Until this year, Iranian companies participated in the Internet primarily as consumers of international bandwidth. In 2010, however, they have expanded their scope. Earlier this year the Iranian state telecommunications company began providing Internet transit services in Afghanistan and Iraq, acting as a carrier for both commercial and government traffic. Over the next few days, we’ll take a look at this interesting evolution, and speculate a bit about what it might mean for the growth of the Eurasian Internet.
Imagine for a moment that you’re a business owner or government minister in a region with very limited telecommunications infrastructure. You see Internet access as a critical priority for social stability and economic development — right alongside traditional voice telecoms, reliable electricity, and safe roads. But your options for international Internet connectivity are limited, because you can’t directly access submarine fiberoptic cables, and geosynchronous satellite connectivity won’t support modern nation-scale Internet access. What would you do? You’d talk with your larger neighbors, and try to negotiate Internet transit through them to the outside world.
This is exactly the scenario playing out in the reconstruction of Afghanistan and Iraqi Kurdistan — two landlocked regions whose technical infrastructure has decayed during years of war. In each case, they may have found a willing investment partner and Internet service provider right next door: the Iranian government.
Call me paranoid – hey, I’m a security consultant – but here there’s not just the opportunity for political influence of the “we’ll switch off your internet” kind; if you’re a theocracy and you decide you don’t want to transport certain kinds of traffic… well, I stick to what I’ve said before on the topic of Internet censorship but the region’s intermediate generation will be provided a very limited subset of what knowledge the Net can offer.
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