First-order effects

• Iranian users on the national network can now reach government services and approved domestic sites directly, while everything outside the walled garden still passes through the state's filtering apparatus.
• The government gains a tested fallback: if international connectivity is cut, domestic administration and commerce can keep running on the internal network alone.

Second-order effects

• That fallback proved decisive a decade on — when Iran imposed a near-90-day national blackout, described by NetBlocks as the longest recorded in a connected society, the intranet was what allowed the state to function before Pezeshkian ordered international access reopened after 87 days.
• The same integrated infrastructure doubles as an enforcement layer: researchers later documented surveillance capabilities spanning communications and internet networks and used against protesters, meaning the intranet concentrates both service delivery and monitoring in state hands.

Third-order effects

• Iran's path shows the structural endpoint of sovereign-network building: once domestic services are fully migrated inside the walls, disconnecting from the global internet shifts from economic self-harm to a sustainable policy instrument, as the earlier pledge that people "will not need foreign networks" (the 2019 intranet expansion) anticipated.
• If other states follow the same sequence — filtering first, domestic platform second, disconnection capability third — internet shutdowns stop being emergency measures and become a standing feature of state control over connectivity.