> Had authorities withdrawn IPv4 routes, as they did with IPv6, Iran would have become completely unreachable, as Egypt was in January 2011. By keeping IPv4 routes in circulation, Iranian authorities can selectively grant full internet access to specific users while denying it to the broader population.
As of late, we’ve seen a few measures like the restoration of transit from Rostelecom and the return of routes originated by IPM, as the country appears to be moving towards a partial restoration. At the time of this writing, the plan appears to be to operate the Iranian internet as a whitelisted network indefinitely.
I’d call that digital apartheid.