Iran’s Draft Internet Law Would Enshrine Net Neutrality – but Exempt State Filtering

A draft framework would write net neutrality explicitly into Iranian law for the first time, requiring internet operators to carry all traffic equally. The principle would not extend to filtering, Iran's system of state-ordered website and app blocking.

The document, the Cyberspace Systematization Plan, is a draft circulated in August 2026 that would fix which state body holds rule-making, licensing and enforcement powers over each part of Iran's internet. Digiato has published the full text separately. It is not enforceable law.

Clause (b) of Article 6 would oblige operators to carry users' traffic without favouring or penalising particular services:

Communication operators are obliged to provide users' internet traffic equally, without any discrimination, restriction, interference or manipulation based on content type, service, application, origin, destination, device, or the identity of the content-service provider.

A further sentence bars "undue discrimination in traffic management, prioritisation, or the allocation of bandwidth and network resources" for or against particular content providers.

According to Digiato, that language would call into question zero-rating, where a provider delivers selected services free or at a discount, the targeted slowing of rival services, and data bundles tied to a single platform - the same practices restricted by the European Union's open-internet rules and by net neutrality regulation in the United States.

Iran runs one of the world's most extensive filtering regimes, with many major foreign platforms and app stores blocked. Writing net neutrality into statute while exempting the state apparatus signals that the draft targets commercial gatekeeping by operators, not government control of what Iranians can reach.

Limits on cutting a user off

Clause (a) of the same article would let a provider cut, suspend or restrict a user's access in only three situations: a confirmed overdue debt to that provider, after notice and a grace period; a final court ruling concerning a specific user; or an explicit order from another competent legal authority. A note gives the Communications Regulatory Commission, which sets telecom tariffs and operator obligations, three months to draft implementing rules that observe "the principles of proportionality and timing."

The exception

Two notes attached to the neutrality clause preserve state control. The first states that "sanitising cyberspace of unauthorised content and services" proceeds on the order of the Committee for Determining Instances of Criminal Content, the inter-agency body that issues filtering orders, placing filtering outside the neutrality rule. The second calls for a separate instruction, drafted by the Supreme Commission for Promoting Content Production, a state content-policy body, exempting educational, technological, research and news use from filtering.

That provision could in practice formalise tiered internet access, in which some users - businesses, journalists, researchers - receive less-restricted connectivity than the general public.

The plan would prohibit commercial discrimination by operators while leaving the state's own discrimination intact.