Russia and Iran are making copycats of China’s Great Firewall

For almost three months, the vast majority of people in Iran were cut off from the internet. Iranian authorities initiated a nationwide internet blackout in February as the U.S. and Israel launched military strikes against the country. With bombs falling from the sky, Iranians could not contact their loved ones, access information about danger zones or look up potentially lifesaving medical guidance.

The blackout — the longest of its kind in the world — marked Iran as one of the world’s worst environments for internet freedom, according to our new edition of Freedom House’s annual Freedom on the Net index, released today.

Iran’s internet blackout was accompanied by a host of other repressive measures, the culmination of an effort to restructure the Iranian internet to isolate the Iranian people. A similar effort is underway in Russia, pursued by Vladimir Putin and his cronies.

Authorities in both countries seek to limit their people to a domestic internet run by government-aligned services, on which the government maintains a stranglehold on information and crushes dissenting speech. The world’s democracies should ensure this effort fails, so that the people of Iran and Russia have a means to challenge their leaders’ authoritarian grasp on power.

Officials in Iran and Russia have pursued an effort to restrict access to global internet services and push people to government-aligned alternatives in a drive to replicate China’s extensive censorship system, known as the Great Firewall. Whereas the Great Firewall was built into China’s infrastructure from the ground up, the governments of Russia and Iran must reengineer their systems to facilitate systemic censorship and coerce their people to comply.

State-backed services are favored for their compliance with government demands for censorship and surveillance, enabling repressive leaders to maintain control on information and political power.

Over the past year, Russian authorities escalated restrictions on Meta’s WhatsApp and the home-grown messaging platform Telegram, slowing speeds drastically. Russian officials have pushed the adoption of Max — a messaging platform developed by government-friendly company VKontakte, or VK — and loaded with surveillance features.

For all their failings, global social media platforms allow for connection and exchange beyond a country’s borders and offer a venue to challenge censorship orders.

Both governments have also restricted access to commercial virtual private networks, or VPNs, which protect internet traffic and enable people to sidestep website censorship.

Iranian officials criminalized the use of VPNs deemed “unauthorized” in 2024, pushing people to use state-licensed providers that allow authorities to carry out censorship and surveillance with ease. During the ongoing conflict, the price of state-backed VPNs skyrocketed, as did the costs on the black market — one person reported paying around $20 for one gigabyte of data, about one-fifth of the average monthly wage.

Iranian and Russian authorities have wielded the pain of internet shutdowns to drive people toward the authoritarian-aligned internet stack. Russian officials announced a “register of socially significant services” in September 2025, which functions as a whitelist of websites that internet providers to which must maintain access during shutdowns. The list features state media outlets and Max, as well as other state-aligned platforms like VK.

The costs of digital isolation are steep and borne by ordinary people. These efforts cut families off from their loved ones abroad, disrupt businesses and international commerce and subject people to mass censorship and surveillance. For officials in Iran and Russia, the prospect of long-term political control is worth the suffering inflicted on their people.

Democracies should work to undermine this effort, particularly by investing in technology that allows people to sidestep these methods of control. Satellite internet services can help people counter internet shutdowns, to the extent that Iranian authorities placed penalties of up to two years imprisonment for the use of unlicensed satellite services in October.

Innovation in direct-to-cell capability may make it possible to solve some of the physical limitations of satellite hubs Other tools like decentralized mesh networks and VPN-like circumvention technology play an important role as well.

In the United States, the Open Technology Fund is a model of American innovation and global leadership in technical efforts to support the open internet.

A nonprofit supported by the government since 2011 that presently operates within the U.S. Agency for Global Media, the fund supports the ecosystem of open-source anti-censorship tools, many of which are purpose-built to support people in closed countries like Iran, Russia and China. The U.S. government should expand its investment in the Open Technology Fund to ensure it has sufficient resources to continue this important work.

The repressive leaders of Iran and Russia seek to carve their people off from the global internet to maintain their hold on power. Ensuring the people can remain connected is essential to breaking that grasp.

Kian Vesteinsson is deputy director for research at Freedom House and the author of “Freedom on the Net 2026: Seismic Shifts on the Global Internet.”