Not everyone is delighted over the huge amount of information which is available on the Internet. News from all over the world spreads all over the Internet and censuring the flow of information is more or less impossible, even if some are doing their best. Iran has chosen a different appraoch, it has namely decided to outlaw broadband. The reason is simply that it is afraid that the country’s 5 million Internet users will be influenced by western music, movies and TV shows. By only allowing Internet connections at up to 128Kbps it will make it considerably harder for Internet users to download such material from the web.
Internet Service Providers and academics are afraid that the prohibition of high-speed internet services will make the country’s IT development slip behind. Iran is also very actively filtrating the information on the Internet, only China is worse.
“Scores of websites and blogs are censored using hi-tech US-made filtering equipment. Iran filters more websites than any other country apart from China. High-speed links can be used with anti-filtering devices to access filtered sites”
