This whole online safety act thing gives me goosebumps.

I had lived most of my live in Russia until migrating in 2022 and I’m pretty familiar with what it means when the gov starts messing with digital censorship.

If you’re not aware, it’s getting systematically harder and harder to browse the free web in Russia despite 50%+ of population using “some” VPN app.

And I’m not even talking extremist / anti-russian resources that the government turned against originally, but most of the independent websites that use CloudFlare free tier, for example. Because cloudflare enables proxying and a couple other IP-masquerading techniques by default, to effectively block a single website you have to block the entire cloudflare IP range and DNS - which is >20% of the web.

As for the VPNs, most of the common protocols and frameworks (eg OpenVPN) are already banned + detected via DPI, and people have to get into more and more sophisticated setups like VLESS+Reality (= most of the non-technical people can’t set it up by themselves or even buy a subscription to such thing). “Simple” shadowsocks, originally popularized in China to fight the great firewall are already almost rendered completely useless.

And it will get worse. The gov service which is responsible for blocking has a very high budget + some pretty neat tech to help them cut off more and more ways to bypass the censorship.

This is the future of any state that gets into this game. The future where you might have to become very proficient in networking and use some “shady” stuff like Tor to just read a blog post about Linux.

It doesn’t matter what it starts with - fighting anti-gov propaganda or, for god’s sake, porn (the least harmful thing for the kids in this horrible ai-post-capitalism world that we live in) — once the regulators get the feeling of power over the free web, every lobbyist, organization and party will come for a part of the web that you personally might enjoy, or even earn living from.