On Internet cables that pass through the United Ar

A technology company linked to the government was launching the first online supermarket in the country. Only a few days later, Iran's state-controlled telecommunications company confirmed it had struck an important deal with its peers in Azerbaijan and Russia, boosting the country's communications capacity and lessening its dependence on Internet cables that pass through the United Arab Emirates and Turkey. Most of these paradoxes are lost on Western observers of the Internet and its role in the politics of Iran and other authoritarian states. Since the publication of John Perry Barlow's "Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace" in 1996, they have been led to believe that cyberspace is conducive to democracy and liberty, and no government would be able to crush that libertarian spirit why, then, Mr. Barlow felt the need to write such a declaration remains unknown to this day. The belief that free and unfettered access to information, combined with new tools of mobilization
On Internet cables that pass through the United Ar