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Comment by matheusmoreira | Hacker News Reader

We still need to replace the ultimate centralized industry: internet service providers. The telecommunications industry has always cooperated with the government and they can be ordered to block the "dangerous" messaging services. We need to somehow replace ISPs with a world-wide mesh network that can't be censored no matter how much governments want to.

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I agree that ISPs are a problem, but it's possible to build a reasonably blockproof service with a doze of p2p darknet and reliance on common transport protocol (read: https). They would, essentially, have to find every node on the network and block them. Or perform very expensive traffic analysis, which can be defended against by designing normal protocol traffic to look very much like normal web traffic.

As always, adoption is going to be poor because even among geeks it's rare for one to deeply care about privacy & anonymity let alone lift a pinky for it.

Unfortunately, the worst threat is a legal one: just offer punishment for anyone who is found guilty of participating in such a network.

Unlike Signal, however, which the parent was taking a pop at - ISPs federate. This is a decent insurance policy in places covered by more than 1 ISP - if an ISP starts blocking content people want, they'll lose their customers overnight.

Not so good in most parts of America, though, where there's often an ISP monopoly.

How do you loop in the rural areas?

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