I’ve gotten some interesting email in response to my earlier post:

Hello Mr Goldberg-
As you can see from my Email address, I work in the internet field.
There are indeed difficulties around “forcing” internet into Iran. The most significant is that the Internet is largely dependent on the TCP/IP protocol, which requires 2-way communication between two nodes. This isn’t like radio, where you can station a transmitter outside the borders. When you read a blog posting, your computer is actually sending information back to the host as it downloads the webpage. So in order for a citizen to even read blogs, they will need to transmit data which makes them open to discovery. This is true whether using land lines or satellites. While satellite uplinks tend to be Line-of-Site, the Iranian government has aircraft that could fly over population centers and easily identify these transmitters.
There are really two problems to solve here. The most interesting is how to create a pervasive network INSIDE Iran. By blanketing the area with cheap wireless units, you could probably create a Peer-to-Peer network. Imagine a website where all the forums, web-pages, etc are distributed in bits across everyones’ computers. One laptop goes offline, that’s ok, because there are thousands of other laptops with the same information. This technology exists today to create “Darknets”, primarily used to pirate copyrighted content. While this could be done over the internet connections people have, they don’t even need internet access. As long as everyone knows the proper network settings, any group of cheap wireless devices (routers, laptops, etc) could connect periodically, trade information and drop off the network. The more devices you have, the more robust the information becomes. It would take some custom application software to manage this, but it is doable.
The second problem, then, is getting the information from Iran’s darknet out into the internet. This could be done periodically, when people can manage a connection via satellite, point-to-point radio or other means. When a node comes online, synchronization between the Darknet content and an internet repository would take place. It isn’t ideal, but if Iran is significantly determined to manage the Internet (as China is) it might be the only way.

Here’s an interesting article on Dark Net. Here’s a tip: Come up with a slightly less menacing name. Freedom Net? Underground Net? RevoNet?

Here’s a discussion over at Fark.com of some relevance.

An interesting post on Iranian web traffic with this interesting graphic: