Closing the Cybergates; Iran is trying to lure Internet users to a government network with the promise of five gigabytes of storage.

Byline: Maziar Bahari

Hey world! Pay attention to us!" Hossein Derakhshan is tired of listening to the debate over Iran's nuclear-weapons program while the world turns a blind eye to oppression inside Iran. So he's making this plea--on his blog (hoder.com). He is one of 60,000 Iranian Internet geeks who are in an uproar over the country's latest plan to clamp down on their cyber-freedoms. The government is planning to roll out an alternative network, called Shaare'2, that it hopes will eventually close off Iran's Web users to the outside world, and allow in only what the state approves.

The move comes in response to rapidly expanding Internet access. More than 2 million Iranians now use the Net on a regular basis, up from only a few thousand four years ago. According to the government's figures, only 15 percent of Iranian Web sites are hosted inside the country, which means the others are beyond the reach of government censorship. Iranian authorities claim they are building Shaare'2 because they are concerned about obscenity and security, but they clearly also want to stifle dissent, which has thrived among the nation's blogging class both inside Iran and the diaspora. "The sole purpose of the plan is to censor undesirable Web sites in the eyes of the government," says an engineer at Iran's Data Communication Co., the government agency that's putting the new network in place.

In recent years, the mullahs stood by while the Internet grew willy-nilly, and now nobody knows how many ...