Life under Iran’s digital blackout

Good morning from the Financial Times. Today is Wednesday, April 29th, and this is your FT News briefing. The Trump administration is going after a late-night comedian again, and the United Arab Emirates is handing in its OPEC membership card. Plus there isn't internet in Iran right now, and during wartime that's especially dangerous. "There is no emergency alert, no text message telling them to evacuate, so when there is active bombing, families are left hoping that the bombs aren't hitting their neighborhood." A Mark Filipino, and here's the news you need to start your day. US Federal regulators have launched a probe into all Disney-owned television stations. They're looking for violations of rules, including, quote, "unlawful discrimination." The Federal Communications Commission announced this yesterday, and it's a significant move against a network that's come down on the wrong side of US President Donald Trump. The review comes as a nationwide debate simmers over political violence and freedom of speech, and as the president and his allies call for Jimmy Kimmel to be fired. The late-night comedian made this joke on ABC, which is owned by Disney, about First Lady Melania Trump. Now this was part of a skit about the White House correspondent's dinner, and it aired a few days before the shooting at that dinner that the Trumps attended. On Monday night, Kimmel defended his joke as satire. "So on Thursday, three days before the event in order to keep that cherished traditional life, I did my own version of the correspondent's dinner on my show. I put on a tuxedo. It was a pretend roast about the fact that he's almost 80 and she's younger than I am. It was not by any stretch of the definition of call to assassination." This isn't the first time Trump and Kimmel have gone head to head. Last year, Kimmel made comments about the killing of conservative activist Charlie Kirk. It got him temporarily taken off the air, a move that Trump applauded. In response to the FCC probe, Disney said its stations have a long record of operating in full compliance with regulatory rules. The United Arab Emirates is calling it quits on OPEC. The UAE said on Tuesday, "It'll leave the oil cartel after almost 60 years of membership. The decision underlines long-running frustrations of a production and simmering geopolitical tensions." So what does this mean for the future of the UAE and the future of OPEC? Andrew England is the FT's Middle East editor. He joins me now to discuss. Hi Andrew. Hi. So how big of a deal is this? It's a pretty big deal actually. Some people would say it wasn't a surprise because as you said, the UAE's long complained about OPEC quotas, restricting its ability to sell more oil. But others are surprised that it's quite a dramatic decision that's happened now at a time when the global energy crisis caused by the US-Israeli war against Iran. And it kind of immediately puts a spotlight on the UAE's relationship with its Gulf neighbor, Saudi Arabia, which is the facto leader of OPEC at a time when all the Gulf states are trying to manage their responses and reactions to the conflict. So on the one hand, you can say, yes, they've been threatening it for a long time and now they've pulled the trigger on the other hand, you can say it's still a dramatic move. Yeah, tell me a little bit more about what the exit might mean for OPEC. The UAE was producing about 3.4 million barrels of oil a day before the war. That's about 12% of OPEC's total production output. Obviously during the war, the UAE, like other oil producers in the Gulf, has had to significantly reduce its production because of the effective closing of the state of hallmouse, which is a prevented tankers getting out of the Gulf and being able to ship oil. Long term, it's going to have a big impact. It's usually it has spare capacity. That means that it can act as a swing producer, which means when there's a desire to increase global oil production, it can do that. So you remove that from OPEC and that immediately removes one of OPEC's tools, which is to be able to raise production when they want to. Is it right to say that maybe OPEC needed the UAE more than the UAE needed OPEC? I guess where does the UAE go from here? Yeah, the UAE's argument has been that they see oil as a commodity they want to monetize whilst they can. Sell as much oil as they can. Use the funds, the petrodollas, the revenue to invest and develop the UAE and prepare for the non-oil economy. So they've seen OPEC production quotas, which have restricted how much its members can produce as a break on their development plans and their ambitions. So if they move out of OPEC and they leave OPEC in theory, you know, once the state of hallmouse is reopened and the oil industry goes back to what it was in the pre-war days, they can sort of ramp up their oil production and start selling more oil. So that serves them. The key point here is that Saudi Arabia needs an oil price of about $100 a barrel to break even, to balance its books. Do UAE's a much wealthier, smaller state. So it needs a lower break even price to balance its books. So if oil prices go down in the future, that doesn't hurt. Do UAE is a much would hurt Saudi Arabia. So this is where the UAE, if it's outside of OPEC, can just do its own thing. The UAE has not been the only one who's been upset with the way that OPEC has been run regarding production curves. Do you think that them leaving will set off a chain reaction causing other countries to leave the group? I mean, OPEC is a big sprawling organization of multiple oil producers. Then they all have their own sovereign interests. The production quotas that have been put in place to prop up oil prices have frustrated others. There's long been complaints that some of its members have been cheating. IE, they've been producing malls in their quotas. So it hasn't always been a harmonious cartel. I think we'll have to wait and see whether others do leave, but there is that possibility. Thanks, Andrew. Thanks. The war in Iran isn't beating down emerging markets anymore. In fact, the case has been just the opposite. EM stocks are soaring, and the MSCI emerging market index has hit a record high. Now emerging markets did get hit at the beginning of the Middle East conflict, but the index has climbed 15% in April so far and is now even outpacing the S&P 500. Semiconductors are to thank for the bounce back in EM stocks. Almost half of their gains this month have come from just three chip makers that play a crucial role in the AI boom. They are the Taiwan semiconductor manufacturing company, as well as Samsung electronics and SK Heinix in Korea. But not everyone is psyched. This run has some investors worried that the emerging market index is just a derivative of AI mania instead of, you know, providing broad exposure across emerging economies. Imagine what it would be like if you lost internet access for weeks. That's what Iranians are experiencing right now. Tehran's Islamic Republic shut down the internet after the US and Israel attacked at the end of February. Two months later, millions of Iranians are still cut off from the world. Cyberwatchdog netblocks says this is the longest country wide shutdown ever. The FT's beta Gaffari has been reporting from Tehran during the blackout. She says every part of life has been affected. The economic grievances have been unbearable for many families. About 10 million Iranians depend entirely on the internet for the work and daily life. So the toll for many businesses has been devastating. I've spoken to teachers, designers, vendors and freelancers who make a living online and they've talked about how badly they've been impacted. Experts estimate that the indirect damage from the shutdown is around $80 million per day, which will add up to billions considering the total number of the days that the internet was down in recent months. Now you might be wondering how I even got a hold of beta. While everyone is offline, there is a so-called white list which applies to a selective group of people who are given access to the internet. The list includes officials, politicians, some influential public figures, security personnel and the media. Their journalists are also included. But if you're not in one of those professions, chances are it's been hard to access any internet since the end of February. Iranian authorities say they cut off the internet in the name of national security reasons. They argue that no online access protects Iranian infrastructure from cyber attacks and digital warfare. But critics argue that the objective is broader and it's not just out of security concerns. They say the regime is fighting an information war and therefore it's using a communications blackout to maintain control, to control the content, to push its own narrative and to intensify surveillance. And Iranians? Well, they're kind of used to this. The Islamic Republic has a history of shutting down the internet every time there is some sort of unrest or conflict. So most recent examples are during the 12th of the war last year when Israel launched military strikes against Iran and was briefly joined by the U.S. and then in January this year when mass anti-regime protests gripped the country, Iranians again went offline for 20 days. So the shutdown isn't a one-off, it's a pattern and it plays out every time there is upheaval or conflict. Now the U.S. Israel and Iran agreed to a temporary ceasefire in early April. But before that the shutdown meant every day Iranians remained in the dark before and during strikes. What many Iranian families complain about most is the lack of an early warning system. There is no emergency alert, no text message telling them to evacuate. So when there is active bombing families are left hoping that the bombs aren't hitting their neighborhood. There are only sources of information are two things, state media and overseas satellite channels based abroad. The Iranian government says that this is temporary and that they'll restore online access once the war ends. But beta points out that things don't really change in Iran. The blackout continued even after Ayatollah Ali Hamani was killed and a new supreme leader came into power. So she's prepared for Tehran to stay in digital darkness for a while. The Islamic Republic is an institution, its survival doesn't depend on one leader, rather on a security apparatus that is still functioning. The regime has spent decades building systems that don't depend on individuals but on an infrastructure. So the blackout is operating exactly as designed. The same institutions that caught the internet in January during the protests before the supreme leader was killed are still in control now. That's the FT's beta-Gaffari reporting from Tehran. You can read more on all these stories for free when you click the links on our show notes. This has been your daily FT News briefing. Check back tomorrow for the latest business news.