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.

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

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

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.

The New Normal in Comparative Perspective detection

The June 2025 Iran shutdown—carried out during the Iran-Israel war beginning ~June 19—did not use BGP route withdrawals as in 2019. Instead, authorities applied service-level restrictions at the national border: DNS poisoning of foreign destinations, protocol whitelisting permitting only pre-approved domestic services, and DPI to block circumvention-tool traffic. Iran's international traffic fell roughly 90% while the country's BGP routes remained advertised, making the shutdown invisible to BGP-based monitoring systems. OONI measurement volume, which totalled 121,333 in June 2025, collapsed to under 200 submissions on June 19-20.

2025-iran-shutdown-measurement Executive Summary / §2 dpidns-poisoningport-blockingip-blocking

Chinese users treat full proxy/VPN (Shadowsocks, V2Ray/Clash, commercial VPNs) as the '终极大杀器' (ultimate solution) for bypassing GitHub DNS poisoning, implying that lighter-weight DNS-only fixes fail in some network environments where the censor adds firewall-layer blocking beyond DNS.

2026-anon-6-github-dns §3 使用代理或 VPN dns-poisoningip-blocking

Rule-based proxy tools (Clash, Shadowsocks, V2Ray) are documented as the most reliable solution for accessing GitHub from China, with split-tunneling rules routing only GitHub traffic through the proxy while keeping domestic traffic on the direct path. Git command-line tools require explicit proxy configuration (git config --global http.proxy http://127.0.0.1:7890) to route clone/push operations, as they do not inherit system proxy settings automatically.

2026-anon-github-2026-6-dns §方法二 dns-poisoningip-blocking

The GFW blocks GitHub via DNS poisoning across at least four domains — github.com, assets-cdn.github.com, github.global.ssl.fastly.net, and raw.githubusercontent.com — causing connection timeouts and page-load failures for mainland China users. The block is persistent as of February 2026, affecting both browser access and command-line git operations.

2026-anon-github-2026-6-dns Introduction / §方法一 dns-poisoningip-blocking

LetsVPN's exit is described as part of a broader pattern: a wave of 'airport' (proxy subscription service) outages across multiple providers in April 2026, documented in a companion article titled '2026年四月份各大机场断线详解,' indicating coordinated or systematic GFW blocking affecting the circumvention ecosystem broadly during this period.

2026-anon-letsvpn-vpn §协议写死，特征太明显 (reference to companion article) dpitls-fingerprintip-blocking

The article documents that large-scale 'one-click' commercial VPN providers with static protocol stacks have become effectively non-viable in China, while subscription-based proxy node services using open-source clients (Clash, Shadowrocket) with server-side rapid IP and datacenter switching demonstrate substantially greater resilience to GFW blocking waves.

2026-anon-letsvpn-vpn §为啥傻瓜式一键VPN越来越难活 & §应该怎么选替代方案 dpitls-fingerprintip-blocking