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Forbidden or Just Filtered: What’s the Score with Internet Dating in Iran?

December was not a good month for Hamsarchat.com (no longer accessible). This popular Iranian Internet dating website that had chalked up over 1.6 million hits was banned for “promoting prostitution”, on the advice of leading Islamic clerics.

Self-titled “Iran’s most complete spouse-finding website”, Hamsarchat (literally: “spouse chat”) promised to connect members with “the closest person or persons to your standards” in return for a modest 25,000 Rial (about 2 Euro) fee. The company insists that its aim was to promote marriage rather than just “friend-finding”.

Hamarschat Gets the Hammer

Following a complaint from Tehran’s public prosecutor, a judge in the case consulted senior Ayatollahs and down went the hammer: Hamarschat was ordered to pay a substantial and return money to its clients. Various press sources stated that the ban had been issued because of the online posting of clients’ pictures and email addresses.

So what caused all the fuss? Of course, there are (at least) two sides to every story…

Potential Hamsarchat clients were required to complete a questionnaire and state their religion, age, height, weight and occupation. They were asked how strongly they felt about a partner’s hijab and invited to state their attitude towards religion, with “free of religion” given as a possible option. The cherry on the controversial cake was that applicants could also select whether their goal was permanent marriage, Islamic temporary marriage or “unknown”.

Iranians Surfing Against the Tide

Iran’s Internet filtration system has hardly caused a cyber-slump: Iranian Internet usage has grown nearly 50 percent every year for the past eight years – the highest growth rate in the Middle East. About 35 % of Iranians use the net, well above the Middle East average of 26 percent.

Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society says Iran is home to one of the world’s richest and most varied blogospheres, with major clusters for secular/reformist politics as well as conservative politics, for “CyberShia” religious discussion and of course… for Persian poetry appreciation!

Along with China, Iran has one of the world’s most extensive Net filtering systems; nowadays grown on home-microchips, instead of the American filtering technology it used to import. A limited number of Internet service providers have been licensed to operate as long as they incorporate software that blocks users from accessing forbidden URLs. In June 2009, just prior to the elections, the Iranian government slowed down bandwidth on all 90 of the country’s Internet providers. One user reported it taking around a minute to load Google.

How to Get Around the Out-of-Bounds

With Internet dating largely off the menu, Iranians are getting through to Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and other “out of bounds” Web destinations via detours in the information superhighway known as proxy servers. While this might not be strictly classifiable as “cyber dating” it is at least “cyber mingling”. According to a MSNBC.com article on How Iran’s Internet works, the deal goes something like this:

“Inside Iran, proxy servers are like passport control points: Outgoing data traffic is checked by the filtering system on the Internet service’s proxy server, and if it’s heading for a forbidden place, it’s blocked from going farther. But if the destination is not on the forbidden list, it’s allowed to go through.

Outside Iran, the proxy servers are like transit points. Activists set up proxy servers on their own computers, using Internet Protocol numbers that don’t appear on the forbidden list. Traffic from Iran can go through to those addresses with no problem. The data traffic is then forwarded to wherever it’s destined to go, even if that destination is supposedly forbidden.”

This makes it really hard to detect the source of Internet traffic coming out of Iran nowadays. But for those who dare to defy the filtration systems, it’s a bit like squatting in a disused building – you never know when your time is up and you’re going to get evicted: Once the Iranian authorities get wind of a popular proxy, they can shut it down by adding it to their forbidden list.

“My eyes drown in tears, yet thirst for but one chance
I’ll give away my whole life, for Beloved, but one glance.
Be ashamed of Beloved’s beautiful eyes and long lashes
If you have seen what I have, and still deny me my trance.”

– Hafiz-e Shirazi, Persian Poet (1300’s)

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