National Security Notebook | Number 11, May 30, 2026

Iranians are back online… sort of.

By the time it started easing last week, the Iranian regime’s internet shutdown – which began in early January after the outbreak of yet another round of grassroots protests, then tightened again following the start of U.S.-Israeli military action in late February – had already earned the dubious distinction as being the longest of its kind in history.

Those restrictions aren’t a thing of the past, exactly. According to web traffic monitor NetBlocks, access to the internet in Iran is still being “heavily filtered,” and there are now a raft of additional restrictions on apps and messaging capabilities. Still, for Iranians who have basically been offline for a quarter of a year, the current “state of restoration” (NetBlocks’ term) is unquestionably a breath of fresh air.

But it begs the question “why”? After all, as I have documented at length, Iran’s leaders learned the hard way back in 2009, during the so-called “Green Revolution,” that connectivity was the lifeblood of the country’s opposition. Ever since, they’ve invested heavily in regulations and tech to complicate the ability of Iranians to communicate with the outside world. They’ve even begun building a sovereign internet (called the National Information Network) with the ambitious plan of ultimately curating online reality for the country’s 93 million-person population.

In fact, the threat posed by a free internet to the regime’s hold on power is so acute that, in recent weeks, many experts I talked to concluded that the Iranian web might never come back online in its prior form – with future access being strictly controlled by the regime through “white lists” instead. What we’re seeing now is something less than that, although news agencies are reporting major restrictions in terms of content that will be made available to Iranians. Clearly, the regime is taking this step grudgingly, and with considerable trepidation.

That it’s doing so at all suggests that the Iranian economy is in worse shape than we understand – and certainly than what Iranian leaders have been signaling to the outside world. That makes sense, because a tenth or more of Iran’s retail sector is e-commerce based, and the country’s broader digital economy contributes roughly 5-6.5% to national GDP, according to the relevant stats.

By itself, that isn’t a large share… but, given the current troubles that Iran is experiencing in its energy exports (a function of the Trump administration’s ongoing maritime blockade of the Hormuz), the internet closure has had a compounding effect on the country’s economic problems. Moreover, it has effectively short-circuited numerous businesses run by the country’s powerful bazaari class, which tends to be a bellwether of political sentiment in the country – and a key potential enabler of sustained unrest, when it invariably breaks out.

In light of all that, it looks like Iran’s remaining leaders have decided to bite the bullet and bring the country back online, as both an economic remedy and a partial political one. Time will tell how far this newfound connectivity extends. My suspicion, though, is that the answer is going to be: “not very.”