Iran’s Internet Blackouts Are Sabotaging Its Own Economy

Iran has presented an especially dramatic case study on the economic impact and humanitarian toll of internet shut downs.

The Iranian regime restricted all digital communication in the country after mass government opposition and protests. Tehran is trying to slow access to popular services. According to the US Department of State, Dragging out the disruptions is revealing the true economic toll of the brutal technique.

Iran is already heavily sanctions and isolated, yet the government has imposed a wide range of digital restrictions and shutdowns. More than 80 million people living in Iran have had their rights affected by the cumulative impact of the last couple of years.

A strategic adviser for the San Francisco–based human rights and civil liberties group United for Iran says that the officials show how they pick their own interests over the public interest. Millions of Iranians have fallen below the poverty line in the past years, and further limiting access to platforms likeInstagram just adds more to that. This disproportionately affects females. Sixty-four percent of Iran's businesses are owned by women.

Businesses use digital platforms in a variety of ways, but digital disruptions can have an impact on businesses of all sizes. Several Iranian trade associations have said recently that their member companies are in the red. Hundreds of thousands of small businesses were impacted by the recent outage.

The degree to which Iran's leadership fears what is possible when its people can communicate with one another and the outside world is underscored by this censorship.

The death of a young woman in the custody of Iran's morality police has led to a protest movement in the country. More than 18,000 people have been arrested by Iranian law enforcement related to the demonstrations, and 500 people, including 60 children, have been killed at the protests.

The analysis of the recent shutdown by a consortium of digital rights groups was published at the end of November and was cited by the State Department. The government has been able to make it harder for people to hide their internet browsing. The blocks on the Play Store, Apple's App Store, and browser extension stores made it harder for Iranians to use circumvention tools. There is a cumulative impact and increasing effectiveness as the government stacks censorship, content filters, and blocking with intermittent and large scale outages.

It's not easy to disentangle the economic impact of the digital black outs from other factors. The State Department believes that the recent protest movement in Iran is more threatening to the regime than previous waves of opposition.

In a high-profile concession to protesters, the Iranian government said it had shut down the morality police that enforced restrictive laws. It is not clear how the move will affect enforcement in practice.

The White House is committed to helping the Iranian people exercise their right to freedom of expression and to freely access information via the internet, according to a State Department spokesman.