What does a repressive regime do to avoid free discussion?

TEHRAN (Reuters) – Iran’s internet service providers (ISPs) have started reducing the speed of Internet access to homes and cafes based on new government-imposed limits, a move critics said appeared to be part of a clampdown on the media.

An official said last week that ISPs were now “forbidden” by the Telecommunications Ministry from providing Internet connections faster than 128 kilobytes per second (KBps), the official IRNA news agency reported. He did not give a reason.

Internet technicians say speeds of 256 KBps, 512 KBps or higher are increasingly common internationally. Iranian surfers will now find it much slower to download music or anything else from the Web. Businesses have not been affected by the move.

Iran cuts Internet speeds to homes and cafes Reuters, Wednesday October 18, 03:41 PM

If the Internet provides a way to get around the traditional, and already controled, media, find a way to repress the Internet. Slowing it down is easier than censoring it.

Meanwhile, in no doubt completely unrelated news:

Michael Chertoff, head of US Homeland Security, warned that people don’t need to travel to a country with “-stan” in its name to become radicalized and commit acts of violence. Instead, they can now turn to the Internet. “They can train themselves over the Internet. They never have to necessarily go to the training camp or speak with anybody else and that diffusion of a combination of hatred and technical skills in things like bomb-making is a dangerous combination,” Chertoff said at a conference of international police chiefs, according to Reuters. “Those are the kind of terrorists that we may not be able to detect with spies and satellites.”

US: Terrorists telecommuting to work by Nate Anderson, 10/17/2006 11:22:49 AM

The U.S. would never crack down on the Internet, right?

Yesterday, FBI Director Robert Mueller showed up at the same conference and delivered a similar message. “Terrorists coordinate their plans cloaked in the anonymity of the Internet, as do violent sexual predators prowling chat rooms,” he said, according to CNet.

Mueller took a further step, though, arguing that the US needs stricter data retention guidelines. “All too often, we find that before we can catch these offenders, Internet service providers have unwittingly deleted the very records that would help us identify these offenders and protect future victims,” Mueller said. The solution? Forcing ISPs to retain data for set periods of time.

FBI head calls for data retention rules by Nate Anderson, 10/18/2006 10:29:11 AM

Well, I’d better get back to the no doubt completely unrelated net neutrality posts. The U.S. already has Internet connections far faster than those in Iran. A tenth as fast as those in Korea and Japan. So this can’t be a problem for the U.S., can it?

-jsq