Since late February 2026, a 40-day military confrontation between Iran, the United States, and Israel has unfolded across the region, following an initial wave of airstrikes that set in motion a cycle of retaliation and broader regional spillovers. The focus, unsurprisingly, has been on security and geopolitics. But the conflict also reshaped something less visible: the infrastructures that sustain connectivity.

At approximately midday on 28 February, global internet access in Iran was effectively cut off for most users. Not entirely, and not for all. What followed was not simply a condition of disconnection, but a reorganisation of the network itself into a layered system in which connectivity was differentially mediated through infrastructural constraints, economic mechanisms, and institutional gatekeeping.

This analysis is based on ten in-depth interviews with business owners, technical operators, and everyday internet users in Iran, conducted during and immediately after the recent conflict. These interviews are complemented by participant observation of connectivity practices, pricing dynamics, and user behavior under conditions of disruption. While not exhaustive, the findings provide a grounded view of how internet governance operates in practice under crisis conditions.

The conflict itself was marked by a combination of network throttling, partial shutdowns, and a temporary shift toward Iran’s national information network. While global connectivity was not uniformly severed, access to international platforms and services became highly unstable, unevenly distributed, and, in many cases, entirely unavailable to the general population.

Frame it less as a shutdown and more as a systemic reconfiguration. What took shape was a layered, high-friction connectivity regime; one in which access is selectively allocated, priced through both formal and informal channels, and managed through an evolving mix of regulatory controls and shadow markets.

The political economy of access

One of the most immediate shifts occurred in the VPN market. Before the conflict, VPN access in Iran was inexpensive and widely available, typically costing less than $2 per month, with some options as low as $0.30–$0.50. During the war, prices increased by 2 to 2.5 times. More importantly, the structure of the market changed. What had been a relatively accessible ecosystem turned into a fragmented and opaque black market for connectivity.

This transformation extended beyond conventional circumvention tools into adjacent infrastructures. Satellite internet – particularly Starlink – quickly became a scarce and high-value commodity. Hardware that retails for roughly $550 in neighboring markets was reportedly resold in Iran for as much as $2,000 through informal channels. Interviews with local intermediaries indicate that some actors generated exceptionally high revenues during this period, underscoring the scale of rent-seeking opportunities created by artificial scarcity and restricted access.

Access itself also became highly unequal. In the first one to two weeks of the conflict, relatively unrestricted connectivity appeared limited to specific groups – primarily journalists and individuals with institutional affiliations. For the broader population, access to the global internet was largely unavailable.

From the second week onward, informal pathways began to emerge. These included the sale of “configurations” – custom connection profiles enabling access to the open internet. Distributed through word-of-mouth networks, these services relied on alternative protocols and tools rather than standard VPNs, suggesting a different underlying infrastructure and possibly a limited number of controlled gateways.

Pricing reflected extreme scarcity. While pre-conflict circumvention costs were around 100,000 IRR per gigabyte, these configurations were sold for 4,000,000 to 7,000,000 IRR per gigabyte – markups of up to 40–50 times. In effect, open internet access became a premium, rationed good.

From unequal access to a tiered internet

Alongside these informal markets, more institutionalised models of access emerged. Telecom operators introduced restricted SIM cards under frameworks often described as “Pro Internet.” These were made available to selected users – such as companies and researchers – through screening processes. However, access remained limited to a narrow set of services, prioritising stability over openness.

A parallel model, sometimes referred to as “white internet,” provided location-bound and time-limited access for certain businesses, often mediated through institutional affiliations such as chambers of commerce. These mechanisms did not restore open connectivity but instead formalised a system of differentiated access.

Evidence from broader datasets reinforces these observations. According to the latest report by the Tehran Chamber of Commerce’s E-Commerce Association, approximately 82% of users in Iran rely on VPNs, indicating that circumvention is systemic rather than marginal. The report also notes that during the blackout period, reduced overall usage improved network performance for a limited subset of users, effectively revealing a de facto tiered internet.

Despite these restrictions, demand for global connectivity has not diminished. Instead, it has been reorganised. Informal markets have expanded, access pathways have diversified, and costs have increased significantly. The result is not reduced usage, but a more unequal and economically stratified system of access.

This pattern is not unique to Iran. In different forms, similar dynamics have emerged in other contexts where governments seek to manage information flows without fully disrupting connectivity. Rather than relying exclusively on complete shutdowns, these approaches introduce graduated forms of restriction that operate through infrastructure, pricing, and selective access, allowing for control without total disconnection.

The economic implications are already visible. International internet traffic remains below pre-conflict levels, affecting digital businesses, cross-border operations, and access to essential services. Layoffs have begun in sectors such as software development, marketing, and finance. The broader economic cost likely reaches hundreds of trillions of IRR per month when accounting for productivity loss and business disruption.

More fundamentally, these dynamics point to a structural shift. What is emerging is a dual internet: one constrained, unstable, and costly for the majority, and another selectively accessible for a limited group of users through formal or informal channels. This is accompanied by the expansion of rent-seeking markets and a gradual erosion of trust in digital infrastructure.

From a governance perspective, the objective is not total control. Rather, it is to increase friction, raise the cost of access, and segment the user base. Even in the presence of widespread circumvention tools, such strategies can effectively shape behavior and information flows at scale.

Taken together, these dynamics suggest a shift from governing information flows at the level of platforms to governing connectivity at the level of infrastructure. Rather than functioning as a blunt instrument of control, disruption operates through the reconfiguration of underlying systems which transforms access into a differentiated, and often monetised, condition.

In this sense, the Iranian case illustrates a broader modality of what might be described as infrastructural governance: a mode of control exercised through the technical and economic architecture of the network itself. Here, access is not simply permitted or denied, but continuously mediated through layered control points, from routing and access provisioning to pricing and protocol-level constraints. This form of governance does not eliminate connectivity; it redistributes it. And in doing so, it repositions infrastructure as a central site of political and economic power; one where the capacity to shape access becomes as consequential as the capacity to restrict it.

The Iranian case points to a broader shift in how digital connectivity may be governed under conditions of geopolitical volatility. As states confront growing pressures surrounding security, information control, and infrastructural resilience, the management of the internet may increasingly move away from binary models of shutdown and openness toward differentiated forms of access. In this emerging arrangement, connectivity is not simply restricted. It is reorganised through layered systems of pricing, prioritisation, and selective mediation. The significance of this transformation extends beyond censorship or crisis management alone. Access to the internet becomes increasingly conditional and stratified, shaped by economic capacity, institutional affiliation, and technical privilege.

In this sense, the internet begins to resemble earlier communications infrastructures, where access was mediated through institutional privilege and uneven technical capacity rather than assumed as a universally shared layer. The Iranian experience does not offer a definitive template for the future of internet governance. Yet it illustrates how rapidly digital infrastructures can be reconfigured during periods of conflict, and how governance mechanisms introduced as temporary responses to crisis may persist long after the crisis itself has passed.