During the June 2025 Israel-Iran war, IODA observed that BGP routing announcements remained largely intact while Active Probing and Telescope signals showed a near-total Internet blackout—a 'stealth blackout' technique that hides shutdown actions behind maintained routing infrastructure. This pattern was replicated in the February 28, 2026 shutdown, where Active Probing dropped to ~3% while BGP remained stable.

IODA Active Probing shows Iran's global Internet connectivity dropped to approximately 3% on February 28, 2026, and had not recovered as of the report date (59+ days). This matches the near-3% floor seen during the January 2026 protests shutdown, establishing a repeatable operational baseline for the regime's tiered blocking posture.

IODA Data: The Discrepancy in the Signals evaluation

Iran officially unveiled 'Internet Pro' on April 14, 2026: a permanent tiered-access system granting selective unfiltered international connectivity to state actors and approved businesses at ~10x normal pricing (~$1–3/GB), while restricting the general population to the National Information Network (NIN). This institutionalizes what the regime frames as 'Internet Sovereignty,' converting international access from a general right to a government-granted privilege.

The Architecture of Tiered Access: "Internet Pro" policy

IODA telescope and Google Product signals, corroborated by Cloudflare Radar and Kentik traffic data, show selective whitelist restoration: Google Search and Images are accessible via the NIN while Google Maps is not, and IranCell (AS44244) shows a slight diurnal Telescope traffic increase consistent with 'Internet Pro' access—demonstrating that selective per-service and per-ASN whitelisting is operationally active.

IODA Data: The Discrepancy in the Signals deployment

The economic cost of Iran's ongoing Internet shutdown is estimated at 40 million USD per day (FactNameh), with the digital retail sector collapsing and approximately 10 million Iranians dependent on the digital economy losing access. VPN workarounds under 'Internet Pro' pricing are prohibitively expensive, rendering circumvention economically unviable for the general population.

The Economic Toll evaluation

Iran's source-IP allowlist severely restricted outbound access before the May 26, 2026 partial restoration: only ~0.017% (~2,000 of 11,766,454 spoofed Iranian IPs) could reach destinations outside Iran. After restoration, reachable IPs increased nearly fourfold to ~0.07% (~8,000), with most newly reachable addresses originating from Noyan Abr Arvan Co. (ASN 202468), indicating expansion rather than removal of the allowlist.

2026-lunarcanvas-swift-look-into §4.1.1 ip-blockingmeasurement-platform

Inbound access to Iran remains heavily restricted even after the May 26 restoration: only ~2.8% of tested global /24 blocks (~400,000 of 14,461,944 representative IPs) could reach the Iran vantage point, compared to over 70% for comparable hosts outside Iran — more than 25× lower reachability — demonstrating that Iran enforces allowlist-based destination-IP filtering on inbound traffic as well as outbound.

2026-lunarcanvas-swift-look-into §4.1.3 ip-blockingmeasurement-platform

'Resource Inaccessible' was the most frequently reported issue (61% of 119 submitted reports) during a month of naturalistic Tor Browser browsing, followed by CAPTCHAs (18%), Broken Content (17%), Other Issues (13%), and Timeouts (5%). These categories document the operational failure modes that degrade everyday Tor Browser usability beyond protocol-level censorship.

2026-micallef-reportor-facilitating-user §6.1, Figure 3 ip-blockingmeasurement-platform

Cloud-hosted services represent an open measurement problem for ZMap because IPs are shared, ephemeral, and behind CDN layers, making traditional IP-to-service attribution unreliable. The paper identifies reconciling scan-based observation with cloud infrastructure as a key challenge for the next decade.

2024-durumeric-ten-years-zmap Abstract — open problems measurement-platformip-blocking

IPv6 measurement remains an open problem for ZMap because the address space is too large for exhaustive single-packet enumeration, unlike IPv4. This asymmetry means IPv6-addressed infrastructure is structurally harder to enumerate via blocklisting.

2024-durumeric-ten-years-zmap Abstract — open problems measurement-platformip-blocking

ZMap can scan the entire public IPv4 address space on a single port in under 45 minutes on a gigabit connection; with a 10 GigE connection and PF_RING, the same scan completes in 5 minutes. This makes Internet-wide enumeration of proxy infrastructure operationally trivial for any well-resourced actor.

2024-durumeric-ten-years-zmap Project overview measurement-platformip-blocking