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Three internet tiers, one negotiating line

3 min read

10:54UTC

Euronews documented Iran's wartime internet on 20 May as a three-tier system: free for senior officials, 40,000 tomans per GB for licensed professionals, 500,000 tomans for the public.

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Key takeaway

The three-tier internet is the structural reason Iran's negotiating posture and its domestic mood run on different information.

Euronews documented Iran's wartime internet on Wednesday 20 May as a three-tier system ¹. The top tier, branded 'White Internet', is reserved for senior officials and select journalists at no charge with full unfiltered access. 'Internet Pro' is sold to licensed professionals, doctors, lawyers, academics and businesses, at 40,000 tomans per gigabyte (roughly €0.20), with curated access to about ten international platforms. The general public pays commercial VPN providers around 500,000 tomans per gigabyte (roughly €2.50), 12.5 times the professional rate, for unreliable connections.

Cumulative economic cost of the wartime internet restriction has exceeded $1 billion by Day 82, Euronews reported, building on the early-blackout daily run-rate of $30-35 million Iran's central bank acknowledged in March. The internet blackout cleared the 2,000-hour cumulative milestone on or around 19 May, on the trajectory previously documented in The National's NetBlocks-based reporting .

An Iranian doctor pays €0.20 per gigabyte on Internet Pro to look up a clinical paper; the unemployed school-leaver across the street pays €2.50 on a commercial VPN to read the same article. ATM networks and hospital systems route through a 1 per cent loyalist tier that doubles as IRGC command-and-control infrastructure. The architecture creates three audiences for any settlement Tehran might sign: an official cadre with global information access; a licensed professional class with curated access; and 88 million citizens whose information set is whatever survives the VPN throttling.

The gap matters because Tehran's negotiating posture, routed through Esmaeil Baghaei's 20 May press briefings and Pakistan's mediating channel, invokes the population as the constituency for any settlement. Baghaei's 20 May 'corrective points' briefing is unreadable to the 88 million Iranians the briefing is meant to represent. Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf declared on 17 May that Iran's '70-day resistance' had accelerated a 'transformation unseen in a century', a domestic-mobilisation message audible to the cadre that does not pay 500,000 tomans per gigabyte to hear it. The three tiers preserve the regime's external coherence at the cost of the domestic legibility a settlement would eventually require.

Deep Analysis

In plain English

Iran has not simply switched off the internet during the war. It has created three different levels of access, depending on who you are. Senior officials and approved journalists get the full, unfiltered internet for free. Doctors, lawyers, and approved businesses can buy access to a limited set of international platforms at €0.20 per gigabyte. For everyone else, the only option is a virtual private network service that costs 12.5 times more. The practical result is that Iran's foreign ministry officials are negotiating with Washington and giving press briefings using a completely unrestricted internet connection. Meanwhile, most Iranian people cannot access news websites to read about those same negotiations. This creates a stark information gap inside the country: the government speaks to the world on a clean line, while the population it claims to represent cannot see what is being decided on their behalf.

Deep Analysis

Root Causes

Iran's tiered internet architecture emerged from institutional lessons drawn from the November 2019 Mahsa Amini-era protests, when a blanket shutdown costing an estimated $1.5 billion in three days failed to prevent protest coordination while generating significant international condemnation.

The 2026 tiered model explicitly preserves economic productivity for licensed professionals while eliminating mass coordination capacity a more surgical application of connectivity restriction than 2019's blunt instrument.

The structural enabler is Iran's National Information Network (NIN), a domestic intranet built over a decade specifically to allow government-controlled connectivity independent of the international internet. The tiered system routes 'White Internet' traffic through NIN's direct international pipes while funnelling professional and public access through increasingly constrained gateways.

What could happen next?

Meaning
The tiered architecture creates a structural information asymmetry: Iran's negotiators operate with full global information access while the domestic population whose legitimacy they invoke cannot access international reporting on the negotiations.
Immediate · Assessed
Consequence
The cumulative $1 billion economic cost, compounding with Hormuz revenue losses and sanctions pressure, narrows Iran's fiscal space for sustaining the war and could force earlier negotiating concessions than the public posture suggests.
Medium term · Reported
Risk
The tiered system's architecture, once operational at this scale, will be harder to dismantle post-war than a simple blanket shutdown; it represents a permanent infrastructure for state-tiered information control that outlasts the immediate conflict.
Long term · Reported

Source Landscape

This story draws on centre-leaning sources from France

France

LeftRight

The cumulative $1 billion cost figure, running at $30-35 million per day in the first 50 days and presumably declining as the tiered system reduced the shutdown's total economic footprint, represents a direct tax on Iranian GDP at a time when the Hormuz closure has already removed major oil export revenues.

The 500,000 tomans per gigabyte public VPN rate approximately €2.50 in a country where the average monthly salary in 2025 was around 15 million tomans positions internet access as a meaningful household expenditure rather than a utility. For context, 20 GB of public VPN access costs roughly 10 million tomans, or two-thirds of an average monthly salary. The economic cost falls disproportionately on lower-income Iranians who cannot access professional licensing.

Consensus view: NetBlocks and Freedom House digital-rights researchers document that Iran's tiered wartime system is structurally distinct from the blanket shutdowns seen in Myanmar 2021 and Ethiopia 2022: the deliberate preservation of elite connectivity means Iranian negotiators and state media operate on full-bandwidth communications while the population those negotiations claim to represent is information-isolated.

Counter-view: Tehran-based communications academics (writing anonymously for outlets including Iran Wire) have argued the tiered system is pragmatically superior to a full shutdown because it preserves the technical infrastructure against degradation, allows the economy's most productive sector to continue functioning, and limits the blunt international-PR damage of a complete blackout while still suppressing street-level coordination.

Key tension: Whether the 12.5x price differential between professional and public access is designed primarily as a revenue mechanism for the state, a coordination-suppression mechanism against the public, or both simultaneously.

Sources:Euronews

Mentions:Euronews →Iran →Pakistan →Internet Pro →Ethiopia →Tehran →Freedom House →NetBlocks →Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf →Washington →Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) →Esmaeil Baqaei →

First Reported In

Update #104 · Three days to Hengli

Euronews· 21 May 2026

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Causes and effects

This Event

Three internet tiers, one negotiating line

Iran's foreign ministry briefs Western counterparts on a clean information line that 88 million citizens cannot use, opening a structural gap between Tehran's negotiating posture and its domestic constituency.

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Different Perspectives

Turkey

Turkey, a major buyer of Russian diesel cargoes, loses that access under Moscow's first producer-binding export ban, in force from 8 July to 31 July. Ankara hosted the same week's NATO summit pledging EUR 70bn to Ukraine, sitting on both sides of the fuel-and-alliance ledger.

NATO

NATO leaders meeting in Ankara on 7 and 8 July pledged EUR 70bn in equipment, assistance and training for Ukraine across 2026, with a 2027 sustainment commitment and a $40bn Drone Edge counter-drone initiative. European allies now fund the vast majority of that package, filling the gap left by Washington's idled crude waiver.

India

India's state refiners continued buying discounted Urals crude as June's price fell to $63.18 a barrel, insulating New Delhi from the OFAC waiver gap still constraining Western buyers. Indian refiners could pick up diesel-export share as Russia's producer-binding ban shuts out its former customers.

China

China's independent refiners kept importing discounted Urals crude through June as the price fell to $63.18 a barrel, down 26% month-on-month per CREA. Beijing has said nothing on Moscow's new diesel ban, leaving Chinese refiners a likely beneficiary if Turkish and Brazilian buyers seek replacement cargoes.

United States

No successor licence has been issued since General License 134C lapsed on 17 June, leaving a 26-day gap, the longest of the war, in the Russian crude waiver. Washington's silence is tightening the channel without any stated decision, as Treasury weighs whether to let it die.

Ukraine

Ukraine's long-range strike campaign shifted from refineries to seaborne fuel tankers crossing the Sea of Azov, cutting tracked vessel traffic 55% between 30 June and 11 July, per Starboard Maritime Intelligence. The shift targets Russia's export revenue directly rather than just domestic supply, adding pressure alongside the collapsing Urals price.