a) protests can and will be crushed by the government forces and people will be ultimately defeated;

b) people have no means to force government to enable back freedoms;

c) control is much easier with no internet available.

Russia is on the same path by providing white-list only internet access "during Ukrainian attacks" and a bit longer every time until ultimately internet will become whitelist only.

Also as we have seen specifically in russia, there is no shortage of senior software developers and network engineers truly putting in their best work to block VPNs better and deeper.

Thus Iran's (and russia's) internet blackout may indeed become permanent.

Update: obviously in this comment I am looking at this from the standpoint of an oppressive government.

but even with his, i still feel angry when i want to check something on google/ins...when i dont have a realiable VPN. i remeber when we start working on golang dev, and because its under google domain so many sub sites is blocked including golang ones, its very time consuming for chinese devs to develop golang projects, you have to figure out the VPN/goproxy... stuff..

At the same time, I can see Apple caving to Iran governement - or China's - and restrict this feature to countries where it is legal.

Firstly the protesters will be able to communicate in private.

And secondly, Iranians will continue to be reminded of the freedoms most other Muslims enjoy: As in free speech and free trade.

One of the reasons the Berlin wall fell was that East Europeans saw on TV that how prosperous Western Europe became.

Given the denied environment the Iranian people see themselves in. I believe its worth mentioning asynchronous networks[1].

For example, they could use NNCP[2] in sneakernet style op[3].

Couriers could even layer steganography techniques on top on the NNCP data going in and out on USB drives. This can all be done now, and doesn't require new circumvention research or tools.

NNCPNET[4] is now active which provides email over NNCP and therefore can be done completely without internet. Once a courier gets to a location that isn't as denied, they can route it over the internet via a NNCP relay. Both for getting information out, and getting data back in.

For those wanting to get information to new agencies, you should consider SecureDrop. Here[5] is a list of securedrop locations.

Like all operations, please consider your OPSEC.

Good luck

[1] www.complete.org/asynchronous-communications/

[2] www.complete.org/NNCP/

[3] www.complete.org/dead-usb-drives-are-fine-building-a-reliable-sneakernet/

[4] www.complete.org/nncpnet-email-network/

[5] https://docs.securedrop.org/en/stable/source/source.html

It's a desperate attempt, that really shows how cornered the administration is.

Any power that fears information, has to have a highly fine grained, high level control of information to maintain power. This is absolutely difficult, in a country as culturally diverse and with a long history as Iran.

Imagine if all the conveniences of the internet were taken from you. Not that you'd never had them, but that you'd come to rely on them and then they were gone. Feels like some palpable oppression to me. And it has nothing to do with your political views. Everyone will feel the squeeze and nobody is gonna be dismissive about it.