Telegram’s Voice Call Got Blocked by Court Order in Iran

Yesterday Telegram’s voice call feature got blocked by the Iranian court order. It’s not yet known why this order has been issued.

A few days ago when Telegram rolled out its voice call feature for the Iranian users, the service got block instantly by the mobile network operators in the country as Pavel Durov tweeted about this incident on his official twitter account. This news got viral in the country and put a pressure on the operators so they unblocked it instantly, simply they had no authority over making this kind of decisions. As the Minister of Communications, Mahmoud Vaezi stated many times in the news, the decision on blocking Telegram’s voice call feature depends on the mobile network operators since they have invested in the infrastructure which Telegram is using for its voice call feature. In this way, the Ministry of Communications made it clear for the people that this has nothing to do with the Ministry and if something happens to Telegram’s voice call feature it would be on the mobile network operators.

It only took 4 days for the mobile network operators to get a court order to block Telegram’s voice call feature. Yesterday the news of this court order went viral to show that how much the carriers are devastated because of this new feature. And it’s not only mobile internet providers which must block Telegram’s voice call, every internet provider in the country must do it. We should also mention that this incident has nothing to do with the filtering or censorship which the Committee for Determining Instances of Criminal Content is in charge of. You can check the Pavel Durov tweets about this matter below:

Even Mahmoud Vaezi the Minister of Communications reacted to this news by saying: “It has been a month since Telegram officials want to launch this service in Iran. Ministry of Communications issued a license for Telegram to launch this service in Iran. But the mobile network operators had different point of views regarding this feature.”

Mahmoud Vaezi even went on and said that he doesn’t know anything about this court order and people should ask the judiciary about its origin. This means that the Ministry of Communications has no authority over this issue but at the end, some authority should stand up for the people and give them the power to choose which service they want to use. Maybe in the upcoming days, the President or even the Parliament would make a stand against the monopoly of the mobile network operators and put an end to these kinds of issues as they did before.