Nearly a third of international domains are inaccessible to Iranian users, Iran's deputy communications minister said on September 14, but the breakdown he gave tells a story less about Washington and more about Tehran's own damaging technology policies.

Behzad Akbari, who also heads the state-owned Infrastructure Communications Company, told IRNA that 31% of international domains are closed to Iranians. That figure alone invites the assumption that US sanctions are strangling Iran's internet access. Akbari's own account complicates it.

He attributed only part of the restrictions to sanctions, a smaller part to what he called the "contamination of Iranian devices", and the rest to domestic internet policy.

Washington's sanctions regime is real and decades old, but it has also carved out exemptions for communications and internet services since 2014, expanded again in 2022. Those OFAC carve-outs mean the sanctions framework does not, on paper, prohibit ordinary internet services from operating in Iran.

The unavailability of "all widely used" artificial intelligence platforms and every Google application programming interface, which Akbari cited, is as likely to reflect platform operators over-complying with sanctions risk, and Tehran's own filtering regime, as any blanket US prohibition.

The bulk of the disruption Akbari described was self-inflicted by Iran's own over-zealous authorities. Iran cut international internet access for about three weeks in January during street protests, then again from February 28 after the outbreak of the US-Israeli war, for a combined near-total blackout of about 88 days, one of the longest anywhere in recent years.

Fibre-optic links to Qatar and Oman were severed during the war, and the country's last remaining Persian Gulf fibre link was cut later still. Washington ordered none of that, and it appears to have backfired.

Akbari said Iran must pay for network equipment in foreign currency, making procurement difficult, and that Tehran is now trying to fund capacity expansion by selling transit services rather than importing gear outright.

But it sits alongside a broadband network that ranked 140th of 151 countries in the July Speedtest Global Index, a result of years of domestic underinvestment as much as external pressure.

"International traffic before January was about 50% higher than its current level," Akbari said. Restored capacity now stands at half of what was lost, he added, with some of the missing traffic never returning to authorised routes at all.