Iranian Government Blocks Citizens' Access to YouTube.com

Internet users in Iran who tried to visit the popular video-sharing website YouTube.com on Tuesday were met with this message: "On the basis of the Islamic Republic of Iran laws, access to this website is not authorized." The same message regularly appears on numerous websites blocked by the government, which include websites opposing the government and pornographic sites.

In a statement Tuesday, the press rights group Reporters Without Borders warned that "censorship is now the rule rather than the exception" in Iran. "The government is trying to create a digital border to stop culture and news coming from abroad—a vision of the Net which is worrying for the country's future," the statement said. "The Iranian government policy is not an isolated case. It is getting closer and closer to that of the authorities in China, with particular stress being laid on censorship of cultural output."

Iran’s Shiite cleric-run government has for years blocked a vast array of websites, including blogs, and the number of websites being blocked has been steadily increasing over the past few months. Reporters Without Borders said that YouTube had been blocked for the past five days, the New York Times Web page was blocked since Friday, and the English site of Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, was blocked from Friday through Sunday.

However, an AP reporter was able to access the New York Times site on Tuesday and other Internet users in Iran said that it was available over the weekend. Western news sites are usually not blocked by the government, and the blocking of Wikipedia could not be confirmed. Iranian officials did not comment on the press rights group’s statement.

Videos from Iranian opposition groups such as the Mujahedeen-e-Khalq have been posted from time to time on YouTube.com as well as videos posted by individual Iranians who espouse opinions critical of the regime in power. The site also displays Iranian pop music videos, which the religious leadership does not approve of. It was not known how long the YouTube.com site has been on Iran’s Web blacklist.

The Reporters Without Borders statement said Western press reports said the government issued a ban on high-speed Internet connections in October. That same month, the group listed Iran as one of the 13 worst culprits for systematic online censorship, along with Belarus, China, Cuba, Egypt, Myanmar, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Tunisia, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Vietnam. Iranian telecommunications officials have denied the ban on high-speed connections, saying that the government had too few lines to extend high-speed connections to some areas of Tehran.

Following the 1997 election of reformist president Mohammed Khatami, hard-liners in the courts have severely restricted pro-reform newspapers. Conservatives shut down many such journals even before Khatami was succeeded by hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad last year. Some independent newspapers still exist in Iran, but they offer a muted criticism of the government in order to keep from being shut down.