Iran threatens to shut down the country's internet

ACCORDING TO a couple of Iranian news sources, the government of Iran could pull a Pakistan, and even go one better and block private access to the Internet altogether in the lead up to March 14th's general elections.

In reformist daily newspaper, Etemad Melli, Iran's Minister of the Interior, Mostafa Pourmohammadi, is quoted as saying, "Shutting down the Internet service will depend on security plans and on the Ministry of Telecommunication".

Another Iranian official, Muhammad Javad Mahmoudi, gave a different and highly suspect reason for the potential internet shutdown, saying that it was only so that the government would be able to use the Internet unimpeded (by slow bandwidth) despite claims by the Iranian Student's News Agency (ISNA) that the governments' Internet lines had recently been upgraded.

Iran has restricted and censored the Internet before, but it hasn't ever yet shut it down on such a worrying scale. In 2006, for example, authorities banned download speeds faster than 128 kilobytes a second on private computers. Millions of Iranians keep up to date with political news on the web and even Iranian political parties actively maintain their own active Web sites. µ