What comes into your mind when you heard about the Persian IGF? We all know that we are living in a modern world or we usually called it a digital era. The meaning of the digital era itself is an era where we use technology and internet connection in everything that we do. No wonder if the internet users keep on increasing every year.
Not to mention, children are already using smartphones connected to the http://128.199.145.222 which then makes them become more active in the digital world. Eventually, it comes to a state where we will have online friends and have real friends. Of course, you cannot interact straightly with your online friends as you can only reach them via online.
In other words, the internet world is a huge world and quite hard to control. That is why it is needed to have a manager or ruler which involves multi-stakeholders. Then, who are the stakeholders? The major stakeholder is, of course, the government and the other is a civil society.
Then, what the internet has to do with the Persian IGF? For your information, internet policies have to be made and this is where the Persian Internet Governance Forum (IGF) steps in. This forum exists to assist the agenda to make the internet policies and followed by all countries in the whole world including the Republic of Iran.
About Persian IGF
The focus of this forum is the Republic of Iran. For your information, Iran has been engaging in the governance of the global internet for a long time since 2003. Therefore, Iran is not an amateur in internet governance since Iran participated in the WSIS Forum which held in Geneva back then. With that being said, Iran has a strong influence on the use of the global internet. Which then makes Iran have specific governance to balance internet governance.
The one thing that you should know is that the Persian Internet Governance Forum is created not to control the users of the internet. Instead, this forum existed to improve the internet so it becomes healthy and safe. The main purposes of this forum are to empower, legitimize, maintain, controlling, and monitoring internet access. The birth of the Internet Governance Forum is due to the record of internet freedom of Iran.
How the Forum Works
Iran sits on the top rank when it comes to internet freedom. Iran has filtered the content on the internet on a huge scale. For example, Iran has forbidden access to several sites on Alexa. Not only that but Iran also filters the keywords, connection, and also DNS hijacking methods. Iran does this not without some reason. The sites they filtered are not just some random sites. These sites contain political, sexual, and culture.
With that being said, the Persian IGF has a limited action in order to influence the improvement of the internet policy in Iran. It is due to Iran has its own comprehensive internet regulation. Not only that but Iran also has full control of the international telecommunication regulations and also internet governance treaties. This is why the Persian Internet Governance Forum is created to help balance the power.