They can't put the genie back in the bottle. Everyday Iranians know what the world outside is like. They can't suddenly become a black box like North Korea. But maybe a few decades of murdering protesters, like mowing the grass, will allow them to limp along in the East German model. Where people know what is available outside but are too afraid and demoralized to make an organized resistance
this post was submitted on 17 Jan 2026
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Russia next?
Russia's already had this plan in the works for years. They call it "Sovereign internet".
Not really the thing, it's more about censorship than full autonomy.
I mean, if not for sanctions preventing one from using most (usually all) payment methods from Russia, such a disconnection would cause problems.
Now it won't, so yeah, living in Russia I pretty much can believe that even waking up one day in a countrywide version of Elektrostal town local forum instead of the Internet is possible.
In that case I'm packing what stuff I need and leaving for any direction open. If there will be directions open.
China too.
Are you not aware of the great firewall?
Different. Iran's proposal would, if enacted, literally makes communications to the outside world impossible, since they are literally disconnecting the internet from the outside. It's more like North Korea. In constrast, VPNs are still a thing in China... for now at least. Not every western site gets blocked. There's a Chinese lemmy instance btw. Information flows in and out of China all the time.
China seems to vary. When I was there, VPNs worked, even Meta and Google sites were accessible on my T-mobile SIM. Other times those things are not accessible
Most people in China can't get a foreign sim lol, so that roaming thing only applies to foreigners.
I watched a video about how to bypass the firewall. Apparantly you could visit a hotel that tourists go to and like just book a room and you can use their wifi... to access the world wide web without the firewall.
Or you somehow order an iPhone or Samsung that's made for the international market, and if you have to import it, hope that the customs overlooks it (I mean it's just a cell phone, not a drone or radios or anything scary looking, shouldn't be too suspicious), then once you get it, purchase an overseas esim and then you can use that roaming and get access to the outside internet.
Or just walk up to some random foreigner and be like: "Ay yo, can you help me get a VPN, I can pay you in cash" (I mean you probably need a translator app if you grew up in mainland China) and hope they don't find you too sus and actually helps you.
Or if you know diasporas willing to help...
I mean I could probably buy a vpn here in the US, then send the vpn credentials and the .exe or .apks via an encrypted .7z compressed file to their qq email with an innocuous-looking title, then say the password over the phone, or mail the password... I doubt they inspect every letter.
Eh in my pretty touristy hotel I was not able to use Google or Meta sites on wifi. But I was surprised vpn worked and allowed me to access anything I wanted over wifi. I had prepared with shadowsocks configured as a contingency but didn't end up needing it. But people visiting a year earlier had reported vpn did not work for them.
What's the chinese lemmy instance?
fasheng.ing
It's very close the Mandarin Pinyin of 发声音 (fāshēngyīn) (to make noise / to speak)
I don't think they have too much activity tho
Exactly, China filters their Internet. Just like Facebook and Twitter do. Instead of being at the whims of two rich individuals it's at the whim of the government.
Not that one is better than the other, but US users experience the same (from a technical standpoint, not ideologically) kind of filtering but they're not told that it is the great Zuck firewall or the great Elon firewall even though it is used in the same way to filter topics and ideas that the owner doesn't like.
Exactly, China filters their Internet. Just like Facebook and Twitter do. Instead of being at the whims of two rich individuals it’s at the whim of the government.
Not that one is better than the other, but US users experience the same (from a technical standpoint, not ideologically) kind of filtering but they’re not told that it is the great Zuck firewall or the great Elon firewall even though it is used in the same way to filter topics and ideas that the owner doesn’t like.
The US doesn't really block VPNs or many websites. I can access Baidu and QQ stuff in the US without a VPN. My parents regularly use WeChat here in the US without a VPN. In contrast, in China you can't access a lot of western sites like Facebook/Twitter/Wikipedia, and, intermittently, Reddit, gets blocked without a VPN, and VPNs are much more difficult to obtain and use in China compared to the US.
As for Facebook/Twitter censorship, that's on the people. They could easily switch to alternative platforms without using any VPNs but they just choose not to.
Oh yeah, certainly. The US Government isn't openly censoring the Internet and most of the 'censorship' is done by private individuals (who, I would argue, have even more power over the average person's life).
I'm not making a false equivalence, just pointing out that even if the government isn't doing it the people in the US shouldn't be so smug because they are also getting viewpoint-filtered Internet, except their viewpoint dictator is some tech bro billionaire of questionable morality.
I will say, to the passive readers, it's very possible to live without a site that recommends you content. Avoiding those sites avoids a huge amount of propaganda and emotional priming (which affects you even if you know it is misleading, very important!). Get your news from reputable polls, primary sources (like court documents and case filings) and trusted news organizations (which absolutely exist, despite the drumbeat of 'don't trust the media(trust Elon instead!)' propaganda over the past decade).
Delete Meta, TikTok and X as if your sanity depends on it. Stay away from Reddit, stay away from Lemmy communities that primarily pedal in content that makes you angry, outraged or afraid. If you see a piece of media that makes you outraged, angry, afraid or to think conspiratorially stay far away. Those emotions can be primed into your subconsciousness through content that you rationally know is misleading, knowing that something is misleading does not protect you from being conditioned by it.
Read psychological textbooks about how this works. Look for terms like respondent conditioning, semantic/context/social priming. The Social Dilemma and The Great Hack are excellent documentaries that show the technology involved(The Social Dilemma) and how it can be used to affect political outcomes like Brexit and Trump's first campaign (The Great Hack, and also any journalism covering Cambridge Analytica).
These are techniques that have been used for advertising purposes for a long time. Now instead of promoting body shame to make you buy makeup, they're selling conspiratorial thinking so that you doubt the reality that you see with your own eyes or fear of government agents so you avoid the polls and fear of social/career/legal retribution so that you don't speak your mind on social media.
Get rid of that garbage and protect yourself from this kind of attack, anyone who is paying attention can see the damage being caused in the world... this is how it is being done. Delete it.
China kinda did already. But they could make it official.
BRICS internet.
Stop trying to make BRICS happen it's not going to happen.
Also it sounds like you want BRICS to be a group of country where they don't have freedom of speech? Why would this be a good thing?
I don’t try.
Just based on China, Iran, and Russia, it seems kinda logical for them to agree on the tech side of things (just to make it look like a big thing).
They'll probably still get pornhub though, right?
All of these repressive regimes are always suppressing porn. I know china takes a hard line against it. Iran must as well given their hardcore religious sensibilities.
The US is getting more authoritarian too and we are cutting off porn, I see a pattern here.
It’s all about keeping up the population so there are lots of new soldiers.
I don't think promoting population growth through cutting off porn, there's no data to suggest a correlation between those two things.
Population growth is more influenced by providing the population with enough income and secure housing so that they're not stressed and scared all of the time. This would hurt earnings and that would upset the handful of people who control most of the private/public equity in the country, so obviously this will not stand a chance of happening until they can't buy politicians.
Banning porn is mostly a 'I'm going to do this thing for this niche group in order to get votes to get/stay in power'. It's to give the social conservatives/Sunday preachers an excuse to talk politics and to do campaign rallies for the people voting for the bills.
They’ll probably still get pornhub though, right?
Honestly, that's not a half bad idea at this point. Maybe we all should. Just shut it all down.