state’s administrative orders and the infrastructural centrality of two entities in Iran’s network, the TCI’s subsidiary, the Information Technology Company (ITC, AS12880), and the Research Center of Theoretical Physics & Mathematics (IPM, AS6736). As a result, all traffic to foreign-based hosts, and likely a majority of connections internally, route through entities with either direct or informal relationships to the government, as demonstrated in Figure \[fig:pathways\].

![International Pathways to Iranian Hosts (Traceroute)[]{data-label="fig:pathways"}](resources/m_lab_ips_2013_02_annonated.png){width="\textwidth"}

The centralization of international communications gateways and domestic peering (the linkages between networks) enables anticompetitive and potentially undemocratic practices that would be more administratively difficult and economically expensive in an open and multi-stakeholder telecommunications market. This design is not specific to Iran alone nor is it an indicator of a government’s desire to control citizen access. Centralization often resembles a commonplace model of public-sector infrastructure development or state revenue generation from telecommunications surcharges [@roberts2011mapping]. With the introduction of the Internet, regulators reflexively extended their mandate to include online communications, as the most common forms of physical connectivity often utilize telephony networks, as well as bringing competitive services such as voice-over-IP. When the network monitoring company Renesys addressed this topic in response to the Internet shutdowns of Egypt and Syria, 