[chmod775]

The only viable way to even get most of them is to shut down internet access entirely. It's not a realistic solution, unlike blocking a few well known IP ranges belonging to a large corp like Cloudflare.

And even if you managed to get them all beforehand, some VPN providers will adapt and keep some servers in reserve, putting them online just as you managed to block the previous ones. Getting around internet censorship is a large chunk of their business, and some are really good at it.

[echoangle]

You don’t really need to block all, you just need to annoy the users enough that paying is easier. And I think there are enough games to use up the IP reserve pretty quickly and getting new ones every time is pretty annoying.

[chmod775]

I can provision a new VPS in about 5s of active work. I'd probably fully automate spinning up new servers and failing over because automatically detecting which got blocked is trivial. Bonus points if you use providers that let you attach multiple IPs to each VPS for cheap. Use some censorship resistant decentralized protocols to provide the next couple IPs to your client software and you're good.

And then they still need to monitor hundreds of VPN providers for whether they have new IPs, which is not neccssarily as easy as just grabbing a list of them. Once they have some, they then need to forward them to the ISPs and ask for them to be blocked. Their process is significantly less friendly to automation.

No country ever won this fight short of total shutdown/disconnects.

[pxc]

> No country ever won this fight short of total shutdown/disconnects.

Some countries also throttle pretty effectively. So you can connect but if you're trying to do more than read Hacker News it's not very usable.