Iran to launch 'Islamic Google Earth' in four months

Lisa Clark

An Iranian minister has announced the country will launch an "Islamic Google Earth" in the next four months, in an attempt to challenge the "spying" tool's monopoly. Referring to it as Google Earth is probably not the best way to begin, then.

Information and communications technology minister Mohammad Hassan Nami made the announcement this week, as reported by Mehr News Agency, saying it is being developed with "Islamic views" in mind to show the world "reality" and "values in Iran". This will all be in contrast to a Google Earth that "belongs to the ominous triangle of the US, England and the Zionists". Any idea of it being an open access educational tool for all, appears to have been lost in translation.

Just how Islamic a 3D view of the globe can be, will be interesting to find out -- though a report flagging up a potential Islamic Google Earth contender last year said it would enable Muslims across the globe to know which way Mecca is, for prayers. Conveying religious and national identity through a flyover is going to be tough, though.

Iran might choose to start with the Persian Gulf. In May last year a foreign ministry spokesperson announced Iran would be launching legal action against Google for removing the body of water's name from its map service. Bahman Dori of the ministry of culture and Islamic guidance said that "Google would not be able to hide the truth" with its actions. The truth behind the matter is that the body of water is known across the globe as the Persian Gulf, but often referred to as the Arabian Gulf by Iran's neighbours. As when Apple attempted to side-step national arguments by not labelling the East China Sea islands -- disputed by China, Japan and Taiwan -- Google looked as though it was trying to avoid any confrontation. No such luck. "Such actions from organisations such as Google would not bear fruit and their visitors will lose trust in the information they provide," said Dori. "By spreading lies, they lose their credibility."

Since announcing it would move away from the global internet to its own national intranet service by the end of 2013, Iran has been intermittently blocking YouTube and Gmail, with the latter reinstated last October only after a public backlash. Meanwhile, millions of other websites are permanently blocked and, most recently, the public reportedly had difficulty accessing these even using VPNs. All these moves, including the launch of a national email system, appear to indicate it is getting closer to an intranet -- the nation may even be hoping to one day mimic a Google-like monopoly on integrated services.

In December 2012, for instance, Iran announced it would launch its own video-sharing site to replace Google-owned YouTube after the controversial Innocence of Muslims film was published on the site. Again, the intent of launching a homegrown alternative was to "attract Persian-speaking users and also promote Iranian culture and oppose western cultural propaganda". That project actually first began in 2009, so it's entirely possible an Islamic Google Earth has been in the works for a while. According to Nami the ministry is currently working on "creating an appropriate datacentre which could be capable of processing this volume of information", so it doesn't yet have the capacity to support it.

Iran has repeatedly referred to Google as a spying tool -- which, in fairness, is not totally inaccurate, considering how much user data is being gathered and logged from integrated services like YouTube and Google (and how many bizarre government structures have been spotted in the desert using Google Earth). This pooling of data has already been criticised by European regulators which are threatening legal action and regard it as excessive and a threat to personal privacy. Iranian authorities probably also love the fact that Google Earth's tech came from a CIA-funded company acquired by Google in 2004. Mehr reports Nami as saying: "On the surface, Google Earth is providing a service to users, but in reality security and intelligence organisations are behind it in order to obtain information from other countries."

It's unclear whether Iran's continual critique of US entities like Google is a commentary on privacy, modern monopolies or ethics, or just a vehicle for persuading the Iranian public that a national intranet is a good idea. An IT consultant who had worked on Iran's intranet project told the Guardian he thought the whole announcement was purely aimed at getting more funding and secure working contracts, considering it is so far off having the infrastructure to launch a datacentre with the kind of capacity they're talking about. It will also be an interesting development to watch, one year on from Apple (worth more £400 billion at the time) attempting, and epically failing, to replace market-leader Google Maps on iOS 6.

How an Islamic Google Earth will be any less of a destructive spy tool than a western one, remains to be seen. Particularly considering it will be named Basir, which means "spectator" in Farsi, but is also the name of an Iranian model of laser-guided artillery.