The Iranian regime’s selective rollback on Internet restrictions has created an ideological litmus test, allowing voices backing the regime to enter online spaces while continuing to isolate the majority of Iranian people digitally, people familiar with the matter told The Jerusalem Post on Thursday.
Iranian Deputy Science Minister Seyed Mehdi Abtahi on Sunday said the regime would allow researchers and professors access to online sites, except those censored by Tehran.
“Based on a list we had, steps have been taken to provide professors with access to the international Internet, and gradually this will be extended to all professors,” he told the Iranian Student News Agency.
Service providers, with the approval of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, have also begun offering an “Internet Pro” package, according to dissident and state-run media reports.
This package allows selected businesses and institutions to access global sites, which remain restricted to the general public.
According to Roger Macmillan, a terrorism and security specialist and former director of the Iranian dissident and diaspora site Iran International, promising access to researchers and academics “is not a liberalization signal.”
“It is the visible face of a control architecture that has been in preparation since at least mid-2025, when internal documents submitted to Iran’s National Cyberspace Center outlined a multiyear plan to eliminate foreign technology dependency and rebuild Iran’s digital ecosystem under permanent state management,” he told the Post.
Iran’s motives in shutting down Internet access were less connected to national security than the regime initially claimed during its January crackdown, Macmillan said.
The regime restricted Internet access to suppress widespread protests across the country, which broke out in response to Iran’s worsening economic crisis.
Suppressing widespread protests across the country
The regime claimed that the blackout was a necessary response to the “foreign-backed” riots that were threatening national security. According to UN experts, such as Mai Sato, it disrupted international monitoring of massive human-rights violations against demonstrators.
“The regime is not reconnecting its population,” Macmillan said. “It is deciding, deliberately and systematically, which Iranians the outside world is permitted to hear. The academics and professionals now receiving access are not the dissidents, the activists, or the ordinary citizens who lived through this war. They are the regime-adjacent voices least likely to threaten the narrative.”
This online landscape has deliberately altered the type of information the West will be privy to, he said.
“The information environment we are reading is not a window into Iranian society,” Macmillan said. “It is the regime feeding us what they want us to hear. The people of Iran still do not have a voice.”
Amir Rashidi, a cybersecurity expert at Miaan, a digital-rights group focused on Iran, told The New York Times: “In Iran, the Internet is no longer being treated as a public right. It is being reframed as a ‘strategic infrastructure’ whose level of access can be adjusted based on security concerns and high-level state priorities.”
He reiterated Macmillan’s claim that Iran has long been planning such an Internet system, although it has repeatedly denied the accusation.
The Internet in Iran was increasingly being treated as a privilege rather than a right, which was the core belief behind the new categorization system determining the level of access a person can receive, Rashidi told the Post.
Iran had failed to communicate the criteria it used to assess whether someone would receive a white SIM card, a type of uncensored access offered by regime authorities, or Internet Pro, he said. There was room to include discriminatory factors such as gender, ethnicity, and religious identities in the process, he added.
While some Iranians could now access certain online spaces, the regime is able to monitor which sites and applications are being accessed, Rashidi said.
With plans to develop its own root certificate, a trust anchor in the online infrastructure, future advancements may also allow the regime to intercept messages or carry out “man-in-the-middle attacks,” he said.
These attacks would allow the regime to alter, intercept, and/or quietly observe private communication, disrupting attempts to whistle-blow to outside authorities such as the United Nations, Rashidi said.