Iran-Israel Ceasefire, Kashmir Blackouts and the Tech Boom Divide: Why Free Internet = Free Thinking

From missiles to muffled modems

A U.S.-brokered truce announced on 25 June paused twelve days of Iranian-Israeli strikes. President Donald Trump hailed success, yet Middle-East scholar Vali Nasr told the Financial Times the deal is “paper-thin,” noting fresh skirmishes within hours. During the fighting, NetBlocks recorded nationwide throttling in Iran, leaving families without WhatsApp, news or banking while sirens wailed.

Kashmir’s digital darkness

Three thousand kilometres east, India repeated a familiar playbook: District Doda in Jammu & Kashmir spent 24–25 April entirely offline, one of at least nine shutdowns logged in 2025. In May, New Delhi ordered X (formerly Twitter) to block more than 8,000 accounts, warning of fines and jail for local staff; X calls it state-mandated censorship. Each blackout freezes digital payments, stalls online classes and widens the gulf between connected megacities and remote valleys.

kids who have never seen peace and kids who have never seen war have different values

Meanwhile, the tech world races ahead

On the opposite side of the globe life is accelerating. Waymo now provides more than 250,000 paid robotaxi rides a week across Phoenix, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Austin having just surpassed 10 million total trips and is building a massive autonomous-vehicle factory in Arizona to meet growing demand.

Boston Dynamics has unveiled an all-electric Atlas capable of parkour backflips before reporting to a Hyundai production line, marking the leap from demo stages to full industrial deployment.

At CES 2025, start-ups launched EEG headsets that track user focus, solar wearables that charge devices on the move, and telehealth kiosks ready to connect patients in remote towns to doctors via satellite. For those who can afford the infrastructure, daily life now means instant rides, smart diagnostics, and near-magical convenience. But on the other side of the digital curtain, millions remain disconnected — by policy, by poverty, by design.

👉Read next: When Iran Went Dark – The Battle for Connection

Free Internet = Free Thinking

When networks fall silent, so do journalists, entrepreneurs, students, families. Free Internet = Free Thinking is not just a line we write it’s the foundation of everything we believe at 0mninet. A world where only the rich can connect is a world where only the powerful can speak. We stand for the opposite: an internet that belongs to everyone, everywhere.

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