“Women, life, freedom” became the protest chant of a revolution still raging in Iran months after a 22-year-old Kurdish woman, Mahsa Amini, died while in custody of morality police. Amini was arrested last September for “improperly” wearing a hijab and violating the Islamic Republic's mandatory dress code laws. Since then, her name has become a viral hashtag invoked by millions of online activists protesting authoritarian regimes around the globe.
In response to Iran's ongoing protests—mostly led by women and young people—Iranian authorities have increasingly restricted Internet access. First, they temporarily blocked popular app stores and indefinitely blocked social media apps like WhatsApp and Instagram. They then implemented sporadic mobile shutdowns wherever protests flared up. Perhaps most extreme, authorities responded to protests in southeast Iran in February by blocking the Internet outright, Al Arabiya reported. Digital and human rights experts say motivations include controlling information, keeping protesters offline, and forcing protesters to use state services where their online activities can be more easily tracked—and sometimes trigger arrests.
As getting online has become increasingly challenging for everyone in Iran—not just protesters—millions have learned to rely on virtual private networks (VPNs) to hide Internet activity, circumvent blocks, and access accurate information beyond state propaganda. Simply put, VPNs work by masking a user's IP address so that governments have a much more difficult time monitoring activity or detecting a user's location. They do this by routing the user's data to the VPN provider's remote servers, making it much harder for an ISP (or a government) to correlate the Internet activity of the VPN provider's servers with the individual users actually engaging in that activity.
But as demand for VPNs has peaked, authorities have recently started moving more intently to block VPN access. That includes potentially taking drastic steps like criminalizing the sale of VPNs. Ars couldn’t reach the Iranian parliament to confirm what, if any, new restrictions may be coming. But experts told Ars that it’s likely censorship will intensify. Seeming to confirm the ongoing escalation, Ruhollah Momen-Nasab, a parliamentary special adviser who is overseeing an Internet restriction bill condemned by more than 50 human rights groups, has recently called for VPN sellers to be executed.
VPN providers have not buckled under this intense pressure, though. Using a pseudonym to protect his identity under heightened government scrutiny, Lucas is a spokesperson for Lantern, one of Iran’s oldest and most popular free VPN tools, with close to 9 million monthly active users in the country. Lucas told Ars that Lantern’s traffic has grown by 400 percent since Amini's death, and because of that, server costs have skyrocketed. To keep VPN access stable while auto-scaling services to meet rising user demand, Lantern started taking donations, maxing out credit cards, and collaborating with other organizations providing VPN services in the area to troubleshoot connection issues as they arise.
“We're constantly getting attacked by the Iranian government,” Lucas told Ars. “So we're in this constant state of looking at the data, listening to users, and trying to come up with completely new techniques to keep everyone online.”
Censorship evolves daily
As part of a small group of organizations defending Internet access in Iran, Lantern helps people like Milad, a 35-year-old Lantern user who requested that Ars not use his full name while discussing his secret VPN use. Circumventing Internet blocks daily, Milad mostly relies on VPNs to “figure out which news is not as reliable” and to direct friends and family to “threads they should follow” so they can read beyond state propaganda and monitor how authorities are responding to protests. For Milad, getting online requires more than just one tool. He needs a complete toolbox of VPNs, anonymity networks, and varied proxy solutions—a personal arsenal of circumvention tools that he has been building for the past decade to stay ahead of ever-changing censorship tactics.
“Censorship here evolves weekly, if not daily,” Milad told Ars. “I use a few tools on a daily basis.”
Iran is behind only Russia as the nation most affected by Internet shutdowns, according to a report from Top10VPN, an independent review site that monitors VPN use and Internet shutdowns. Last year, Internet shutdowns cost the Iran economy $773 million—money that businesses lost during 130 hours of Internet throttling, 2,179 hours of Internet blackouts, and 4,863 hours of social media shutdowns. Globally, the cost to economies in 2022 was nearly $24 billion, which is more than 300 percent higher than shutdown costs in 2021.
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