[qualeed]

Sure. However, the effort spent vs. what is gained has to be considered. Not all games of whack-a-mole are created equal.

VPNs are incredibly easy to spin up, gambling groups are not. Within a week I could probably spin up a dozen or more semi-legitimate VPN companies. Multiply that by however many hundreds of people are willing to do the same. Add a few thousand more people willing to spin up completely shady 'free' VPNs.

The scale quickly exceeds what you can possibly block, unless you firewall the nation.

[reliabilityguy]

Sure. But majority of the people (as seen with China, or Russia) do not care about VPN and won’t care. So, it seems to me that this way it will be easier for law enforcement to achieve what they want just because the target pool is already smaller.

[qualeed]

>But majority of the people (as seen with China, or Russia) do not care about VPN and won’t care

The article that our comments are under are about an 18x increase in sign-ups from the UK for one provider, a 2.5x increase for another provider, a 10x increase for yet another provider, etc. in just days.

I'm curious about your stats for China/Russia, though. Where/how do you find out how many internet users in those countries have a subscription to and/or use a VPN? Would those stats continue to hold true if there was not a great firewall in China, and just rudimentary IP-blocking of VPN providers?

[reliabilityguy]

> The article that our comments are under are about an 18x increase in sign-ups from the UK for one provider, a 2.5x increase for another provider, a 10x increase for yet another provider, etc. in just days.

Those numbers mean nothing without the baseline. What if before it was 1 person and now it’s 18x more, totaling 19 people?

W.r.t. data about China and Russia, I don’t want to pay for market reports, but occasional discussions about China, for example, show that about 35% of internet users use VPN (https://www.reddit.com/r/China/comments/i3afnz/how_many_peop..., the thread has some links for more info). However, it is unclear how many of those users are private citizens use VPN to specifically bypass censorship. From my anecdotal experience from work and my PhD, most Chinese I met just don’t care about censorship and lack of access to FB, YouTube, or whatever. Chinese are like western users for the most part, on average they need social media, financial apps, maybe search, etc. they are not actively looking for censored info.

[qualeed]

>Those numbers mean nothing without the baseline. What if before it was 1 person and now it’s 18x more, totaling 19 people?

They obviously don't mean nothing. Knowing absolute numbers would be much better, but knowing that the direction of the trend (people previously not caring now care) is informative by itself. It's safe to assume that more than 1 person had a VPN subscription previously.

I appreciate the link and additional insight. The way you phrased it before, I was expecting you to quote sub 10% or less. 35% is not inconsequential, especially considering the environment.

In the end, I'm not convinced you can extrapolate Chinese internet usage patterns to the UK, given the large cultural differences (specifically in regards to internet, history of censorship, etc.). Someone who has grown up their entire lives under the great firewall will react differently to censorship than someone who has grown up their entire lives under a mostly free internet that is now being censored.

[reliabilityguy]

> but knowing that the direction of the trend (people previously not caring now care) is informative by itself.

Sure. However, without baseline numbers how do you know who are the people signing up for VPNs? This is the whole point: is it the general public en masse, or some of tech people who had no VPN before?

> In the end, I'm not convinced you can extrapolate Chinese internet usage patterns to the UK, given the large cultural differences (specifically in regards to internet, history of censorship, etc.). Someone who has grown up their entire lives under the great firewall will react differently to censorship than someone who has grown up their entire lives under a mostly free internet that is now being censored.

Of course culture makes a huge difference, but you cannot strongly prove the opposite just based on the assumption about cultural differences. I think the the average consumer simply does not care enough. Remember, the expectation on average is that the access to the information is free.

I guess time will tell :)