[thothamon]

I could split hairs and suggest that the browser accept the phony CA and simply use a secondary encryption layer on top of it, but that misses your point. A sufficiently clever evil government will see that you're doing something encryption-like and shoot you.

But, being "sufficiently clever" isn't all that easy. China has done a good job, but they're a very big country with a lot of resources and a lot of very smart people, and let's be honest, even as good as they are, anyone with a will to get that censored information will get it.

It costs a lot to censor people on the Internet. The goal of people like me is not to stop the most determined, intelligent censorship approaches, but rather to make them as expensive as possible to build and maintain.

My ideal is force governments to either accept the Internet without censorship, or almost completely disconnect from the Internet (and simultaneously deny their nations the competitive advantages that come with it). North Korea is a good model. They basically don't have Internet in North Korea. It's sad, but I can live with that; it's better than allowing an oppressive regime to benefit from the Internet while oppressing their citizens.

[mdhardeman]

"Sufficiently clever" has historically been more expensive than difficult.

For example, in order to scale less expensively, the Great Firewall is architected such that it need not actively be in the middle of the entire flow of traffic and need not actively proxy. Historically, they didn't need it to do so in order to achieve their goals.

Now, however, the advancement of a combination of new technologies is finally closing that gap.

In order to maintain historic blocking capability it becomes necessary in the long run to actively MiTM all the connections.

But that can be made to scale and there are nations who can afford it.

How do we know? Because the job is not significantly harder than serving up all that content. (At worst it's a little more than 2x the work.)

And today most content is served up from a handful of privately owned infrastructures. If a corporation can build it, so too can a lot of nation-states.

The incentives to build this have changed.