> But the "internet routes around censorship" folks are usually talking about company-less code (or information), in its pure sense.
Is it company-less, though? Code is useless without the silicon that brings it to life, without the people that maintain that silicon, without the power grid that energizes it, and without the data links that connect it. Like I understand what you're saying, you're saying that the pure technology itself is the liberating part, and I agree with that about halfway. But code doesn't run on nothing. To run your code, you'll need a computer, either in your home or business. That computer is sold to you by a vendor, and it's connected to internet sold to you by a different vendor, and is powered by electricity sold to you by a different vendor. Ergo, your code is dependent upon the infrastructure to which you are in turn beholden to. And none of this changes if you use AWS or whatever, you're just adding more vendors and more middlemen, who in turn are buying the needed things from whomever else, etc. Ultimately, if whatever authority decides you must not proceed with what you're doing, that can be enforced in numerous ways, all of which mean that you will not proceed. Or at the very least, will make it much harder.
We saw this recently with the Parler fiasco.
> To cast into concrete terms, we're talking about Facebook (company example) vs DeCSS (code).
But DeCSS only works with DVD drives sold to you by manufacturers in PC's sold to you by manufacturers, running on electricity sold to you by a utility. The code, the information, that's free. But taking it and doing something useful with it, in this case decrypting DVD's, requires hardware, and if for whatever odd reason the U.S. State Department decided that nobody was ever going to use it in the States again, maybe they couldn't stop it entirely, sure, but they can make it infinitely more difficult to do so.