Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/330349 
Year of Publication: 
2025
Citation: 
[Journal:] Internet Policy Review [ISSN:] 2197-6775 [Volume:] 14 [Issue:] 3 [Year:] 2025 [Pages:] 1-8
Publisher: 
Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society, Berlin
Abstract: 
This essay examines Iran's most extensive internet disruption since 2022, imposed during the June 2025 conflict with Israel, when missile strikes quickly evolved into coordinated cyberattacks on banking, radar, and communications systems. Drawing from direct experience during the blackout, it traces how connectivity collapsed through staged throttling, protocol suppression, and full reliance on the National Information Network. What began as a technical containment strategy also became an improvised shield against foreign intrusion - one shaped as much by sanctions-driven hardware shortages and reliance on insecure gray-market equipment as by military calculus. By situating Iran's shutdown alongside wartime digital restrictions in places like Ukraine, the essay reframes shutdowns as contested acts of defense in a securitised internet. It explores how the shift from an open, decentralised network toward nationalised, politically bordered infrastructures is accelerating under the pressures of war, sanctions, and private platform power. Ultimately, it argues that the "state of exception" once theorised by Schmitt and Agamben is becoming the default operating mode online, eroding universal digital rights. In such moments, ideals like internet freedom survive only if continuously defended and reinvented, even when survival demands compromises unthinkable in peacetime.
Subjects: 
Internet shutdown
Digital sovereignty
Cyberwar
Censorship
Iran
Persistent Identifier of the first edition: 
Creative Commons License: 
cc-by Logo
Document Type: 
Article

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