Hacker News Reader

Sorry, the reference to Tor is misleading. I was not referring to anonymity but rather access to content from restricted areas like the Middle East or Asia.

View on HN

In that sense, I would agree, ipfs can provide access to content that would otherwise be blocked.

Could ISPs throttle IPFS content the same way they did with torrents a while ago? (and probably will again once net neutrality falls).

Sure -- but libp2p's network transports underneath are pluggable. There's already Websockets (/ws, think domain fronting! [1]) and Tor (/onion) transports, so there's various options for evading censorship (I personally consider bandwidth throttling a form of censorship).

[1] Domain fronting lets you use a well-established web frontend for your web service. E.g. we could host /ws nodes in Google Cloud, and to the ISP the TLS handshake looks like it's for google.com, while inside the connection there's e.g. a `Host: libp2p.googlecloud.com` header. More info: https://www.bamsoftware.com/papers/fronting/

But then again, net neutrality is a political issue! You don't solve it for good with technology.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com