> It is not possible to censor the internet when VPNs are freely available.

The obvious next step is to ban VPNs too or to block connections to their servers.

There are ways around this too. When the VPN entrance point is a static IP a ban may work but what happens when a product shows up that spins up dynamic VPSs in the public cloud? All the cloud providers have free trials that let people do this for free forever. Sounds difficult but surely people will come up with a streamlined approach if push comes to shove. Even in china where using a VPN is a major crime they are unable to stop people from using them.

▲

gorgoiler a day ago | parent [-]

Off the top of my head here are some ways you could fairly easily shut down VPNs.

The big one is to start whitelisting good protocols only. That means everything must be https and you have to at least pass the hostname in plaintext. Random traffic on UDP ports is now illegal as it is assumed to be VPN traffic.

Another one is to pass a law telling ISPs to flag customers with traffic patterns only to a single IP address, set of IP addresses, or a single ASN. This means that you can’t just tunnel everything to your VPS in Amsterdam.

You might also pass a law that still allows, say, ssh and random UDP traffic, but with the provision that bandwidth on any non HTTPS ports is capped at 200kbps. You only use ssh for running a shell after all — why would you need more than that! /s

ASNs are a fun feature of the internet in that there are a lot of them but they are finite and scale on the order of organised human activity, mostly businesses. That means it is eminently tractable to categorize them all and regulate traffic from residential ISPs to commercial services ISPs only, and throttle traffic from home users to hosting providers. This already happens — try connecting to Reddit from anything other than a residential IP address.

	▲	grayhatter 14 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> Random traffic on UDP ports is now illegal as it is assumed to be VPN traffic. You do realize that things other than VPNs use UDP right? The whole post is so nonsensical I would have assumed it's all sarcasm, but the single tag in the middle has me confused.
	▲	cma 17 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		You can do UDP like VPNs over https, by opening multiple channels and round robining packets to get around head of line blocking.
	▲	a day ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		[deleted]
	▲	inkyoto a day ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Disruption at the technical level will prove excessively convoluted and impractical to enforce, for censorship-resistant VPN technologies continue to evolve at an accelerated pace – Amnezia and XRay2 serve as exemplary cases in point. A far more expedient course lies in legislative control: the imposition of a licensing requirement for VPN usage, coupled with punitive measures – fines and imprisonment – for defiance thereof. A few well-chosen prosecutions, conducted publicly with a fanfare and pomp and without leniency, would suffice to instil both fear and obedience amongst the populace. As ever, the familiar refrain of «think of the children» would provide an acceptable veneer of moral justification to soothe the public conscience.