Iran restores access to Gmail
On Monday, Mohammad Reza Aghamiri, a member of governmental Internet watchdog committee, told the semiofficial Mehr news agency that authorities have lifted the Gmail ban after resolving technical problems to separate YouTube and Gmail. As of Monday, YouTube is still blocked, while Gmail is now available Iran's cyber monitors often tout their fight against the West's "soft war" of influence through the Web, but trying to block Google's popular Gmail appeared to be a swipe too far.
Complaints piled up -- even from email-starved parliament members -- and forced authorities to double down on their promises to create a parallel Web universe with Tehran as its center.
The strong backlash and the unspecific pledges for an Iran-centric Internet alternative to the Silicon Valley powers and others highlight the two sides of the Islamic Republic's ongoing battles with the Web. It's spurred another technological mobilization that fits neatly into Iran's self-crafted image as the Muslim world's showcase for science, including sending satellites into orbit, claiming advances in cloning and stem cell research and facing down the West over its nuclear program.
But there also are the hard realities of trying to reinvent the Web. Iran's highly educated and widely tech-savvy population is unlikely to warm quickly to potential clunky homegrown browsers or email services. And then there's the potential political and economic fallout of trying to close the tap on familiar sites such as Gmail.
"Some problems have emerged through the blocking of Gmail," Hussein Garrousi, a member of a parliamentary committee on industry, was quoted Sunday by the independent Aftab-e Yazd daily. What he apparently meant was that many lawmakers were angry and missing their emails.
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