Iran’s regime is preparing to disconnect from international internet portals and instead offer up its own intra-portal for Iranians. The internet hub will be strictly domestic and within the plenary control of the regime thus allowing for stricter censorship.

Iran’s regimes offers the new domestic internet portal as a cheaper alternative for Iranians and as a version of the net which upholds the values of the Islamic Republic, but the real motive is, of course, limiting the access of Iranian dissidents to the internet, limiting their ability to communicate with the outside world, and naturally making it easier to follow and silence opponents.

Ever since the start of the Iranian Green Movement after the disputed, most likely stolen election, of 2009 the Iranian regime, never light-handed or liberal, has grown much more harsher in its oppression and more insular. Beyond executing dissidents at a rate of two-a-day for months now and arresting hundreds including opponent leaders, the regime has also grown more confrontational toward the West and promoted a dogmatic nationalism at home. Even going so far as to ban foreign cooking shows as imperialist schemes.

And after no doubt witnessing and taking notes at the potent power of social networks to organize dissidents and protest movements in Tunisia, Egypt and elsewhere in the Arab world, the regime - ever paranoid and leery - is seeking to preemptive such action at home but undermining even the already restrictive nature of Iranian internet through cutting it from the rest of the world in order to block foreign assistance/communication to Iranian dissidents and cut off websites like Facebook and Twitter, if need be.

Such is the nature of the Iranian regime and its desperation to remain in power. It thinks it can continue to add a layer of walls to guard its position. But Mubarak went so far as to shut down the entire net and still was ousted, and the French stormed the Bastille without the internet. And, quite salient and worth remembering, Iranians had their Islamic 1979 Revolution when the internet did not even exist.

So the Iranian regime is playing a futile and forlorn game. Internet is solely a means. People will always find the end.