Friends in Iran, journalists and technicians, are saying that judiciary officials have ordered all major ISP to filter all blogging services including PersianBlog, BlogSpot, Blogger, BlogSky, and even BlogRolling.

They have also ordered to filter Orkut, Yahoo Personals and some other popular dating and social networking websites.

For ISPs this means a big loss, since much of their recent sales have been because of people writing and reading blogs and surfing Orkut. So the government is effectively eliminating small and private ISPs by bankrupting them, whiteout paying a political price for it.

As I had said before, I think we can adopt a three-level strategy for fighting Net censorship in Iran:

Technical: using proxies, email, P2P applications, etc.
Civil: creating consumer associations for internet users and organizing effective campaigns through them against the censorship.
Legal: filing local or even international lawsuits against the government and related organizations or officials for violating the constitution of Iran and international law.
While still relevant and potentially effective, I believe they are not enough now.

The EU and the US must seriously consider demanding for an end to the Internet censorship during their negotiations with the Iranian government.

We also have to look for ways to beam Internet direcly to Iranian users in Tehran and other big cities via cheap satellite connections.

I call this "open access" and it's actually one of the projects a few friends and I are working on: to use millions of satellite dishes in Iranian houses to access the net, without interference of local ISPs.

UPDATES

- As usual, ParsOnline has been the first ISP to obey Telecom, followed by Datak, based on comments in Sobhaneh.

- Joi wonders about Typepad and LiveJournal. Actually, they have almost no user in Iran. Typepad for it requires credit card -- which doesn't exist in Iran -- and LiveJournal maybe because it's not localized yet.

Source: http://hoder.com/weblog/archives/013115.shtml