Iran has not yet flipped the switch

There has been much talk of Internet shutdowns in Iran, but according to one expert as of June 14th, Internet in Iran has been running at near its regular levels. James Cowie, CTO for Renesys, a web-analytics company, whatever shortages that happened were very shortlived.

While the government's crackdown certainly appears to be blocking individual sites, the government of Iran appears not to have made any move towards taking down the Internet as a whole – a step taken by the Burma regime in protests in September of 2007. And it would be easy for them to do, according to Cowier, who I interviewed for my story, Iran's Twitter Revolution.

The country has only one major internet service provider, Data Communications Iran (DCI) which is run by the government, and subcontracts to smaller ISPs. “The interesting thing is that they can turn the Internet on-and-off like a light switch. but they have chosen not to do it,” Cowier says.

Cowier has analyzed Internet activity from DCI and concluded that there have not been any major outages. “Iran remains well-connected to the Internet from a routing perspective,” he notes in a blog entry.

While the government has not yet pulled the plug they are definitely restricting the web in other ways.

Here is a video from ITNNEWS on internet problems faced by protesters:

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