How common are VPNs?
Facebook is censored in Iran, yet it is very popular. If you want to roughly estimate how many people circumvent censorship on a daily basis, just find out how many Iranians actively use Facebook. I guess it would be possible to find a number with Graph Search.
In Iran with the censorship, could the same thing be happening? Someone created it, the government sees some uses for it, an organization was tasked with enforcing it but since there are a lot of ways to circumvent it and everybody knows how, that might show this organization does not actively care enough to update it's filter. That is, it's there because someone someday had the stupid idea of creating a big firewall, but there is less and less support to actually make it real and effective?
Would I be right in assuming this much?
When internet became popular, the government monopoly got threatened. Since then they did everything in their power to restrict the use of internet. First they passed regulations that forced private ISPs to buy their bandwidth through a government organization and deployed a censorship software (rumored to be Chinese) on all of it, so blocking is national not per ISP. The they passed a law restricting home users to 128 kbps (yes, kilobits per second not even kilobytes). Then they criminalized providing anti-censorship solutions (but not using them, although it is debated). In some occasions (like after 2009 election), they make the internet so slow it is virtually impossible to use. HTTPS traffic is always slower than HTTP and occasionally completely blocked.
It is all about maintaining power to control the narrative. As I said, it hasn't worked as well as they have expected. Now they are building something called National Internet. They say they don't plan to block access to the internet but I am not so hopeful.
It has been a decade-long battle between government and freedom of information and speech. Most people who are affected aren't dissidents, but simply people who want to update their Facebook status.
It is sad because we are a fairly developed country. There is no war or famine, our healthcare system is good, we have powerful industries, good universities, big cities with good public transportation and interstate highways, etc.
The problem is that over the years since the Islamic Revolution our nation has become more liberal in general while the government remains rigidly conservative. It will be a long answer to describe where we are and how we got here, but I think this short comment is enough to answer your question.
Pretty sure most coursera vids and materials are ripped and avail via torrent too. If not could wholesale rip the site and mirror it free on yandex cloud. Russia laughs at US petty sanctions
I, personally, was always very skeptical about the VPN services sold in the wild. Who knew what machine you were routing your data through was not controlled by the government themselves?