I see you’ve never been anywhere that blocks VPNs.
First they will make it seem like only criminals would use VPNs, then they’ll target some actually shady VPN services to use as a scapegoat, then they’ll apply punitive measures to them specifically; then they will use the fact that they have already used punitive measures as a reason to use them blanketly.
Technically: it’s pretty trivial to block almost all VPNs at an ISP level. I think only anyconnect/openconnect is difficult (not impossible) to block.
That this would affect businesses is of no consequence.
> That this would affect businesses is of no consequence.
This is a historically unpopular government, where a significant proportion of their own membership is opposed to the government as well, dependent on business donors because its membership numbers has crashed.
I think the effect on businesses would make going after VPNs entirely dead in the water.
Honestly as long as you can connect two pcs together, you can theoretically create a proxy.
Its theoretically possible to create a proxy from one pc to another using iroh/quic/(dumbpipe, which got like 880 upvotes I think on HN and I think is trending which is nice)
I feel like Its a cat and mouse game but that's just my 2 cents
It doesn't have to work on a technical level. Just grab a few people at random, torture them until someone admits guilt, then televise the guilty verdict and life-destroying sentence. Do this two or three times and fear will do the rest of the work for you.
Get the websites blocked too, some kinda minor fine if you're identified as using one, make it seem scary in the public eye to discourage it, ban advertisements?
You can't really stop it, but you can start treating it like Piracy. Maybe ISPs could snoop and report traffic that seems to be going to a VPN even if they can't inspect it.
They could probably manage to deal with the big players (who have enough advertising reach to be used by "ordinary" people). I doubt they could ever block the long tail of non-standard VPNs, especially those that share infrastructure used for legitimate purposes (are they going to ban SSH connections to AWS?).
First they will make it seem like only criminals would use VPNs, then they’ll target some actually shady VPN services to use as a scapegoat, then they’ll apply punitive measures to them specifically; then they will use the fact that they have already used punitive measures as a reason to use them blanketly.
Technically: it’s pretty trivial to block almost all VPNs at an ISP level. I think only anyconnect/openconnect is difficult (not impossible) to block.
That this would affect businesses is of no consequence.