Araz News: The Islamic Republic of Iran is spending $36 million to develop what has been called “smart filtering” in order to strengthen its Internet censorship capabilities.

The project is to be completed in collaboration with several domestic universities, the report said. Smart filtering allows for selective blocking of content within a website, as opposed to the complete blocking or shutting down of an entire website.

Smart filtering refers to the selective blocking of content within a website, as opposed to the complete blocking or shutting down of an entire website.

The initiative, announced by deputy Communications and Information Technology Minister Ali Asghar Amidian in an interview with the Iranian Student News Agency (ISNA) on February 18, 2016, reflects growing concern among hardliners in Iran over the state’s ability to control the citizenry’s access to information given the huge growth of Internet use in the country.

It also reflects an unspoken acknowledgement of the state’s movement away from the wholesale blocking of websites that have become widely used in Iran, by both the citizenry and state officials and also growing concern among hardliners in Iran over the state’s ability to control the citizenry’s access to information given the huge growth of Internet use in the country, adding that it has been almost a decade since Iranian officials promised to introduce “smart filtering”, with limited success.

Even though a number of universities, namely Shahid Beheshti, will be receiving funds for helping the “smart filtering” project, as per Iranian officials, it is likely that the necessary hardware and software would be imported from abroad.

It should be noted that in recent years, Beijing, which boasts of having spent $770 million on its “Great Firewall of China” to control all incoming and outgoing online traffic, has been Iran’s main supplier of Internet censorship tools.

Official figures show that more than 30 million people out of Iran’s total population of 75 million use the Internet.

A recent study found that more than 69 percent of young users use illegal software to bypass official restrictions.

By-H.A