Things China can't do: Magically "downgrade", "decrypt" or "intercept" the secure protocols we use every day like HTTPS. Facts won't budge, the technology we are using does what it says on the tin.
The Internet can't route around you being thrown off a tall building by men with guns, but the IETF has for some years considered it to be extremely important to design the network protocols to prevent these shenanigans. BCP # 188 "Pervasive Monitoring is An Attack"
Normal people don’t care about “downgrade” or “decrypt” or “intercept” they care about availability.
But of course the easiest approved “VPN” is just data roaming.
You're describing exactly the opposite of what I found to be the facts on the ground. My connection to a residential address in the United States was allowed for a couple of days at a hostel, then blocked. It was never allowed over (Chinese) mobile data.
But it was completely fine over the internet service to my apartment. The home internet service and the mobile service were provided by the same company in a bundled plan. I was always curious what they were doing.
They aren't stupid, they're not going to insta-block everything they can detect, giving away clues to people trying to evade it.
If there's civil unrest, they can of course essentially turn off the internet, but there's a distinction between "the internet can route around censorship" and "the internet can be blocked in its entirety (or near entirety)"
1. Make it illegal to distribute a browser that distrusts their CA
2. Make it illegal to run a browser that distrusts their CA
3. Block all encrypted traffic that they can't MITM and notify police that you are running illegal softwareFurthermore, doing any of the things you listed would isolate all legitimate network traffic as well as any undesirable traffic, fully shuttering all Chinese manufacturing businesses from global requests via the web. This hat would happen then? Phone calls, emails, and even physical mail would become the new norm and most of the Chinese economy would collapse under the weight of not being able to hop on a Zoom with a client that wants tooling made for its aluminum manufacturing molds.
So besides my point of the black market your hypothesis of total control misses all the other pressures that exist that make what you’re proposing infeasible on its face. Only a place like North Korea that is willing to be a pariah state is old be willing to take the economic and social costs associated with your proposal, and they’ve only been able to do that because their abominable regime was in place before the internet existed and they pre-built controls very late in the game.
Tl;dr simply because a country _could_ do something doesn’t mean it’s realistic for reasons outside of basic networking concepts.
Doesn’t require cracking crypto or any funny business around forcing people to install stuff.
I mean... They could, though, no? If they control the gateways they could drop any traffic that isn't encrypted with some root cert that allows them to decrypt in transit packets.
I'm sure that works in a Hollywood movie, in the same way you could reverse the polarity of the lasers to enable you to travel inside the computer from a household video projector, or decrypt all the world's telephone calls using a device built into your batmobile - but this isn't a Hollywood movie and so traffic isn't in fact "encrypted with a root cert".
If for any of a variety of reasons the Chinese authorities don't want your connection to exist they'll terminate the connection, exactly as I described in my earlier comment.
So there is a route around censorship, but maybe the public doesn't really care about it.
People with more first hand experience can probably explain it better but it doesn’t seem that strict. China is not North Korea, their aims seem less about preventing people from learning about the world and more preventing non compliant foreign tech companies having Chinese users.
I suppose Utah could impose some sort of strategy here, but would be so burdensome and anti-American I’m not sure they could pull it off. Instead of a blacklist of sites dictated by the site provider, you go the other way where all Utah ISPs maintain a whitelist of IPs permitted to Utah citizens. Any traffic attempting to reach a non-white listed IP, would be rejected.
The layer 2 and 3 of ISO/OSI stack does indeed "route around censorship". But the Internet as we know it is all Layer 7, and it's as centralized as it gets.
That's why regulators often aim straight at Layer 7 entities - companies providing consumer services over the web. Because no matter how unblockable the route between you and some server is, it doesn't mean anything when the server itself is refusing to talk to you.
It's a politico-technological arms race. They make their laws. We make technology that completely nullifies their laws. They need to increase their tyranny in order to enjoy the same level of control they had before. The end state is either a totalitarian government or an uncontrollable population.
I used to think that we'd find some kind of equilibrium along the way, that we'd eventually discover the government's limits: some principle they refuse to break, some line they refuse to cross...
But the truth is these tyrants have no limits whatsoever. They'll stop at nothing in their quest to control the flow of information.
A VPN/proxy could exist at almost any single address at any given time.
> “I sometimes joke that we might as well turn the Ministry of Communications and the Supreme Council of Cyberspace into amusement parks, because they will no longer serve any purpose,” Hakami said.
https://gulfnews.com/world/mena/iran-official-says-starlink-...
To a large degree, most of the internet today is ultimately controlled by a few people. If what you have to say pisses off these people, and someone is determined to keep you off the internet, you have a problem. Kiwi Farms is a well known example, and continues to suffer under regular DDOS attacks. Regardless of how you feel about KF, it's undeniable that a) this nonsense has streissanded the site enormously and b) it's speech you don't like that needs protection.
Also there was the whole covid "misinformation" garbage fire... I certainly do not want my government or some megacorp to decide what can and can't say or read.
And going beyond the internet, I just want to remind you Americans, that your 1st amendment is almost unique (to my knowledge). Enjoy and protect your offensive, hateful, blasphemous, extremist, and deeply unpopular speech.