US tech sanctions leave all Iranians in the dark

“Sanctions on digital products and services make the ‘foreign enemy’ syndrome more severe and a more effective tool for isolating the country even further. It is the foreign enemy that doesn’t want you to talk to your kids abroad on Google Talk, it is not the government,” said Farzaneh Badiei, director of the Social Media Governance Initiative at Yale Law School.

“Another problem is these kinds of sanctions legitimize the concept of a national internet. The government can argue that we need to be able to assert sovereignty over the internet so that we’d be self-sufficient and not need them. In reality, they want to create a national internet so that civil society’s access to a global internet diminishes,” she told Asia Times.

Kurosh Ziabari

Asia Times