Iran’s Internet governance policies and actions have recently been coalesced in one policy seen through both domestic and international efforts. These have been coalesced into the wider localisation policy. I use “localisation” as a term to define Iran’s attempts to assert control over its digital borders, while centralising the data and scope of content its citizen’s experience online to local infrastructures. These infrastructures carry out controlled content, and store data within reach of Iranian authorities. This paper will ask what domestic and international efforts Iran is undertaking to pursue “sovereign internet light” as part of its localisation efforts?
Countries such as Russia and China have taken on a global focus to destabilize US and western dominance of international governance of the Internet. They have been overtly involved in inter-governmental efforts to decentralize US leadership within the multi-stakeholder global internet regime (Mueller, 2010; Deibert and Crete-Nishihata 2012; Nocetti, 2015). Iran’s engagements in the internet governance sphere have been reactive to the global impact of Internet and its governance on state sovereignty, and in turn their impact on the laws of the Islamic Republic of Iran. However, their efforts to counter western domination and influence over the Internet has been positioned as a local development effort. Iranian “localisation” is part of a broader policy Iran has developed since the early 2000s, known as the National Internet Network (NIN). While Russia has presented an aggressive “Sovereign Internet Bill” which attempts to give Russia the ability to cut off the country from the world wide web, Iran’s framing comes with more subtlety. In 2012, the NIN had created a fear of a ‘halal internet’, however the current administration has been turning to more benign framing such as promoting “Persian language applications” as seen in the WSIS explanation. “Localisation” has in a way become a hallmark of Iran’s efforts to attain sovereignty over its digital borders without engaging in the fear of disconnecting from the rest of the global Internet.
In order to answer the proposed research question, this paper will do a discourse analysis of three legal texts and six years of statements by the Ministry of ICT at the WSIS forum, between 2013 and 2019. These analyses will shed light on the new “sovereign internet light” strategy which has changed the more aggressive image of the original National Information Network (NIN).
