No it's not. The"plan" is to have an slow global Internet connection (about 256 kbps) that connects you to The Internet (which is of course heavily filtered), and a faster (a few MBps), domestic intranet that connects offices, government agencies, banks, news agencies, universities and schools together. Home users can sign up for this intranet thing too, so purchasing (and downloading) a movie (from a server inside the country) would take a couple hours, not a day. That's the "carrot".

Blocking google or gmail was never in that plan; dangerous social networks, like Facebook, twitter and G+ are all blocked (and have been, for years) of course. But a search engine or mail provider theoretically should be left alone!

Is access to facebook harder to get in Iran than China? In China you can see ads everywhere selling VPNs that enable access to facebook. You can even get permission from the government for business to gain access to unfiltered internet. Some up scale hotels have done this.

There is this a nice John Gilmore quote regarding the internet and censorship, I sure hope it works out that way in this case. The big difference between NK and Iran is that in the Iranian case people will know what they are missing.

> The big difference between NK and Iran is that in the Iranian case people will know what they are missing.

To begin with.

Exactly. Even one generation removed makes a hell of a difference. Hearing stories about something is worlds apart from actually knowing something. They are already 40 some years out from the revolution, the people who remember the proceeding society are starting to get old now.

Even if the situation is not getting worse per se, they need to turn it around soon while they still have people who remember what it was like before, or they risk significant cultural loss.

It's weird how that works both ways. YouTube its hard to think is only actually 5 years old (possibly because it has been backfilled with content). But what people assume "has always been there" is actually quite fluid.

At least Iranian population is demographically and geographically more difficult to control than NK.

The quote is: "The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it."