TEHRAN, Iran, April. 13
Trend:
Secretary of Iran's Supreme Council of Cyberspace Abolhassan Firouzabadi announced the final draft of the regulation on providing legal VPN services to local population, adding that ICT is responsible for determining the eligible recipients of this service, Trend reports citing Mehr News Agency.
“The legal VPN issue was on the agenda of Working Group for Determining Instances of Criminal Content (WGDICC) to review the regulations for the legal use of VPN in the country,” Firouzabadi said.
Explaining the purpose of drafting this regulation, he said that the VPN should be legally assigned to classes and groups according to their needs and requirements, including industries and businesses.
“The Ministry of Information and Communications Technology is in charge of implementing this regulation,” he said.
“The ministry will either directly issue the license of the legal VPN to the eligible groups, or it will delegate the issuance of the licenses to to an operator,” he added.
Referring to the preparation of guidelines for determining the level of different people's access to internet in WGDICC, he said that it has been agreed to define different levels of access for users.
“Since the VPN service has become a large business and many organizations and individuals are taking advantage of it, we can formally form VPN operators in the country under the responsibility of the prosecutor's office and ICT,” he added.
This means that the VPN will be assigned through a specific order and order through official operators and its assignment will be based on theservices that need to be used in the country, he said.
“Certain organizations depending on their activities need to use VPNs, such as government agencies, banks and embassies,” he said. "The US sanctions on sites and applications forced businesses to access VPNs.”
In the first few years of the 21st century, Iran experienced a great surge in Internet usage. As of 2018, Iran has an estimate internet penetration rate of between 64 to 69 percent out of a population of about 82 million.
As of 2012, an average of 27 percent of websites were blocked at a given time and as of 2013 almost 50 percent of the top 500 visited websites worldwide were blocked, including YouTube, Facebook, Twitter.
The business of selling virtual private networks (VPNs), SOCKS, and proxy servers in Iran is worth millions of U.S. dollars due to large demand.