On 22 February, a committee of Iranian MPs voted 18 to 1 to pass a bill now commonly referred to as the “User Protection Bill”. The vote received unprecedented public attention in the weeks and months leading up to it due to the common perception among Iranians that the bill intends to restrict their access to the global internet and international platforms. The clearly rushed and opaque process to pass the bill in the Majles (Iranian parliament) and its troubling content has been condemned by many human rights advocates and organisations inside and outside of the country.
Since then, it appears that the vote has been voided due to procedural technicality, and it may be weeks before the bill makes its way back to the parliament for a fresh vote. Despite this temporary setback, many people worry that the bill will eventually be passed despite significant public backlash.
Not many observers thought that the new parliament would become the centre of attention in the struggle for control of the internet. With significantly more influential bodies such as the Supreme Council for Cyberspace (SCC), the Judiciary and the ICT Ministry, the Majles has rarely been taken seriously by digital rights activists and observers as a driving force behind internet restrictions in Iran.
However, this dynamic has changed over the past year. The unabashedly anti-internet bill (whose name has changed many times over the past year) progressed through parliament. With it, the public protest over the parliament’s vision for the future of the internet in Iran has intensified.
For context, the current Iranian parliament was elected in February 2020 with the lowest parliamentary voter turnout in the history of the Islamic Republic. A combination of dissatisfaction with the national politics and economy, public disillusion with the pro-reform faction, and a decade of rather ineffective parliaments led to many Iranians boycotting the elections. In the absence of any real competition, hardline Principlist deputies dominated the new parliament after the election.
Soon after its formation in 2020, the newly elected Majles jumped on the opportunity to advance and amend the “Managing Social Messaging Apps” Bill, which had been proposed and then tabled in the previous parliament, which posed less of a threat to the internet in Iran First tabled in November 2018, the bill called for more routine blocking of international platforms and a handover of the internet infrastructure to Iran’s armed forces. Riddled with several problematic articles, the bill did not gain notable momentum until the new parliament was elected.
Quickly after the formation of the new parliament and appointment of different specialist committees, the process to redraft and reintroduce the bill started, but this time with more grand ambitions of reshaping internet governance in Iran and with more support and momentum in the parliament.
On 21 July 2021, nearly a year after new members had taken their seats, parliament voted to advance the bill under Article 85 of the Iranian constitution. This would allow the parliament to delegate discussion and ratification of new legislation to a small committee of MPs rather than the whole of parliament.
The Iranian public expressed widespread concern in response to this move by parliament, which included online protests across social media. The public was visibly opposed to the bill being discussed in a committee of MPs and its fate being left to a small number of parliamentarians.
But more importantly, the Iranian public showed deep concern with the content of the bill. Since then several iterations of the bill have been drafted under different names, but despite small cosmetic changes, the core tenets remain intact. Upon examining the different versions of the bill, there is no doubt that its supporters are determined to use the bill to limit access to international platforms, give greater control to the armed forces and push for drastically greater surveillance of the population.
Although many of these measures have already been adopted as official policies by the state through SCC resolutions, the formalization of these policies through an official parliamentary bill has raised fears among Iranians regarding the future of the internet in the country.
In addition, the close association of this bill with Reza Taghipour, a newly elected Member of Parliament and former ICT Minister during Ahmadinejad’s administration, has alarmed many digital rights activists, human rights campaigners, and observers.
Taghipour oversaw the drastic measures to increase information controls in Iran between 2009 and 2012 during the peak of the Green Movement protests across the country. He was added to the EU sanctions list in March 2012 for his role as ICT minister in implementing internet censorship in Iran.
He was one of the early supporters of restricting internet access in Iran under the banner of “clean internet”. During his tenure as the ICT Minister, he was known for his rants against the internet saying that it is designed based on liberal and humanist values and therefore is dangerous for society.
Taghipour is also a personal appointee of the Iranian Supreme Leader to the SCC, which supports the argument that the current bill is backed by the SSC and the Supreme Leader.
After the nullification of the vote which took place on 22 February, Taghipour has been even more vocal about his support for the bill, promoting it among the media with the promise that parliament will continue discussing the bill after passing the annual budget.
It seems that the Islamic Republic’s leadership has intentionally picked parliament as a so-called democratic body to legitimize its vision for the future of the country’s internet. This move is similar to what the state did in 2009 when they pushed the Cyber Crime Law through parliament as a way to legitimize it.
For millions of Iranians who have protested online and demanded the withdrawal of the bill, this is not just about a section or article of the bill. This has shaped up to be a battle about the future of the internet in Iran as a whole since Iranian leadership seems determined to move forward with further localisation, information controls, and human rights restrictions.
The Rouhani administration’s mission, as defined by the SCC, was to deliver the infrastructure for this anti-internet environment. It appears Raisi’s era will be defined by battles waged between the Iranian public and the state over plans to further localize and control the internet. As the stage is set right now, there can only be one winner, the Iranian public demanding better access to the internet, or those seeking to drastically restrict it further.
