Friday, January 05, 2007

Internet Crackdown In Iran

A familiar source from Iran who previously worked for an ISP there tells BoingBoing,
I have heard from several sources that Iranian ministry of "culture and islamic guidance" has published a set of regulations for Iranian websites. Parts of this are to force all website owners to register their website and their own identity. Hosting companies inside Iran cannot host any website unless the site owner has already registered their information. After a registration deadline two months from now, persian websites not registered are at risk of filtering (censorship).
The website to register this information is
www.samandehi.ir.
I could not find any official document stating this fact. But since some media sources in Iran - and also the BBC Persian service - have criticized this, the chance it is true is very high. Unfortunately (or fortunately) I am no more in Iran. At the moment I am searching for some reliable sources inside Iran to confirm this.
It would be interesting to know how the BBC confirmed the data they published as a news article here (Persian):
link.

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