[jbstack]

Italy. Examples of sites I can't access without VPN: torrent sites (including legal uses), betfair.com (which I use as a more accurate political predictor than polls), and various non-EU sites which block access because they've decided it's easier than complying with extra-territorial requirements imposed by the EU (this one isn't direct EU censorship, but it amounts to the same thing indirectly.

Sometimes I set my VPN destination to the UK (my country of origin) to get around these. Then I find that I have other problems. For example, certain Reddit posts are unavailable to me because someone has posted a comment that some algorithm has decided is NSFW (and therefore triggers age verification under the UK Online Safety Act 2023).

The result is that I have to turn my VPN on and off depending on what I'm trying to do.

[amarcheschi]

Italian here. I can access most of the torrent sites and betfair.it (which I guess is the localized version) without vpn

I might have changed my dns in the past

[asgerhb]

I'm unfamiliar with Italian piracy laws and surveillance but I can tell you that accessing torrent sites for me was a simple matter of choosing a proper DNS provider.

[intended]

This is a definition of censorship that seems to equate restrictions to any website or data stream as freedom, not whether the content of the site breaks local laws. This is a bit extreme, since most countries have laws against gambling, and if you could get around it by just setting up servers abroad, what value are local laws?

[jbstack]

I'm not sure I see any practical difference between a government saying "we will block website X because we don't like it" and "we will block website X because we say that website X is illegal". For example if Iran blocks a website which is critical of the regime, do you consider it important whether such criticisms are against the law or not in Iran? I think most people would consider it censorship either way.

If you want to make gambling illegal, then make gambling illegal and then enforce that law. You don't need to resort to indirect measures that go beyond the law (e.g. by preventing me from merely viewing the odds on a gambling website).

[intended]

Gambling of a certain type is illegal in India but the workaround has been to place ads from sites based outside of India.

How would you solve this.

[iamnothere]

Make gambling legal and regulated? Or tell citizens they are on their own and may be violating the law if they gamble, then look the other way and occasionally promote stories about citizens losing their money to illegal gambling.

US citizens living in states without legal gambling can often drive across state lines or to the nearest Native American reservation to gamble. There’s no way of preventing this nor does there need to be.

[intended]

Why make gambling legal just to satisfy people who are circumventing the laws? That too by basing themselves outside of the country, as opposed to state lines.

Indian society is unconcerned, if not outright supportive of this law.

Your counterpoint zeroes in on the specific example, but in addressing it avoids the spirit of the issue.

People want certain laws and restrictions. You are arguing that if people choose to circumvent those laws, tough beans.

Heck, you could just have nations destabilize neighbors by this lassiez faire approach.

[iamnothere]

Because what you’re asking for is untenable in a world of billions of people scattered across countless nations, at least without cutting off the internet outside your borders entirely like North Korea. And trying to force the issue domestically just results in oppression and restriction of human rights. The global digital world is a formless, borderless space; this “freedom VPN” thing, Tor, I2P, v2ray, satellite internet, etc, you will simply never be able to fill all the gaps. Those who want to will get around it.

Even China, who has probably the most sophisticated information controls in the world, can’t prevent leaks through the Great Firewall. They just rely on it being “good enough” to restrain the general public.

Put another way, your country can make all the laws it wants, but it can’t change the laws of another country or force them to change how their network behaves, at least not without a fight. And in a world of billions of people, the global network will always be doing something that you don’t approve of, somewhere!

[kybernetyk]

>what value are local laws

local laws are local and not global. otherwise we could start obeying Iran's or North Korea's laws just to be safe of not breaching any local laws.

[eunos]

"Your law enforcement is censorship, while my censorship is law enforcement "

Got it

[esterna]

I also live in the EU. betfair.com is not blocked by my ISP here. Rather, they are blocking my ISP ("[...] you may be accessing the Betfair website from a country that Betfair does not accept bets from [...]"). That the website not only prevents betting but also does not show any odds is a technical decision on their part. Gambling regulation is also usually domestic, and not EU law.

Websites deciding EU users are not valuable enough to comply with GDPR is, as you say, also not censorship. It is again the technical decision of some website owners to provide their content only in conjunction with illegal processing of your data.

I have not had issues accessing torrent indices from the EU. This too is usually handled domestically and has little to do with the EU.

There is legitimately dangerous (current and upcoming) EU legislation (Chat Control, eIDAS, age verification, previously the Data Retention Directive), so I don't think it necessary to weaken your argument by listing non-examples.