“We’re rewiring the Internet for freedom.”

Refraction networking depends on an incentive scheme where the costs of cutting off all outside TLS access is too great a burden to bear for censoring networks or countries.

However, some countries are actively working to build enough self-sufficiency and content that a smaller and smaller minority of their users will ever "need" to reach beyond state-observed wall gardens.

The effectiveness of technologies like refraction networking can be amplified if paired with compelling content only accessible outside tightly controlled cyber-borders. Unfortunately, this is much harder than it sounds.

I'm glad to hear that "larger, longer-term trial deployments" of TapDance are in the works.

Until this month, when I saw this I would have first thought of China and Russia and those others. But now I'm starting to think about North America.

(The article begins) For the last two years, a team of engineers and researchers has quietly been working to develop new technology for Internet freedom.

Today, we are pleased to share results from the first large-scale field trial of refraction networking, a fundamentally new way to help people around the world learn and communicate online in the face of censorship. We served more than 50,000 users, for more than a week, by deploying refraction networking at partner ISPs.