Iran's internet blackout may become permanent, with access for elites only

But EU countries should be a bastion of freedom, free speech, free access to information, democracy, human rights, rights to this, rights to that... Why do we, the EU countries have to use the same playbook? Yes, banning the whole internet is in one way worse and in other easier, than just banning a list of sites where people can find a way around it, but again, the difference is just in the quantity, the censorship factor is the same. The government gets scared people will see some other propaganda from the other side, and censors it... and even that is done very selectively (daily mail is still accessible from over here, so are fox news and cnn)

With spain it's even worse, because it's not even the government doing it, but the government giving the right of censorship to a private company which clearly abuses that right and the government tolerates this... no court orders, no judges, no way to complain, no fair use, no nothing, a private company decides and the government gives them a blank stamped paper to aprove that.

Yes, i know iran has it much worse, but there's nothing we can do about it here, assuming the internet is banned for iranians and they can't read this or comment here. But EU is doing the same, and we've been tolerating it for years... a site here, a site there,... not everything, but censorship is still censorship, no matter how many sites are censored, and there are people from EU here that should argue against censorship, even if it's just a few sites and not all of them.

So, misteriously (suspicions of bribery abound) now they block full blocks of internet preventively, bringing down innocent and paying customers with them. From Law Enforcement to privatized Minority Report.

Thats what people dislike. If you are a private entity and loose money to piracy, use the legal framework to solve it. Don’t override it with lobbying

On the other hand, there are many people from EU here who need to hear it, that EU is doing the same as iran... censoring websites and more (IDs, chat control,...). Yes, maybe not at the same level, less sites are censored here, but censorship is still censorship, and the trend is going towards more control and more censorship.

United states, israel (and palestine), etc. are different. Are we bothered by what israel is doing in palestine? Yes! (some of us). Can we actually do something about it? Sure... the germans can tell their government to stop selling weapons to israel [0], we can implement sanctions, tarrifs, etc. This is something that we can do "at home", something that can make some change. We did that for russia, we did that for iran, north korea etc (at various times and various levels), but we did something. We didn't really do that (at least not at scale) for isreal. US is doing that to us (EU) with tarrifs every two weeks, but we didn't really properly respond, even under the threat of an invasion on greenland.

Yes, restricted internet in iran is bad, but we can't stop it. Sadly, changing back EU rules is similarly hard to do, which again, is something that should be fixed, by us, at home.

[0] https://www.dw.com/en/war-in-gaza-germany-supplies-30-of-isr...

And even if the man was wearing a proper "Palestine Action" shirt that'd still be pretty concerning. It is an insane stretch to say that wearing a shirt represents a matter for police action. How far the world has moved on from when the UK could be considered a forward-thinking bastion of liberalism.

About 2 decades ago I read an article about how bureucracies don't even allow for humor any more, e.g. even clearly joking about having a bomb in the airport is now taboo. Something about rigid inhumane inflexible rules, in my vague memory of that article.

Where airport security has to examine babies for terrorist motives, because it's written in the rules, fuck human reasoning!

Heh in my own estimation arresting supporters of Palestine Action for peacefully protesting is already too close to Iranian autocracy ideal and too far from a "democratic country" ideal which the UK used to be...

The important point is, if the erosion of civil liberties continues, these governments are losing their high ground. They must stop.

As in the Cold War, I would give an allowance for the West to still be preferable (modulo strict rights record) if they actually muster some sort of power to confront tyranny. But if the rulers only want cheap rhetoric wins, no.

If South American dictatorships could have their way with less blood and less noise, don't you think they would prefer that?

I'm reminded of a tragicomic recent admission from Nate Silver of 538 fame. He said Disney almost never interfered in their editorial process, as if that was a good thing. What that really meant, after all, was that Disney was perfectly willing to interfere in their editorial process, but almost never felt the need to. (As you would expect. I mean, why would Disney care about political polling?)

Could it similarly be that the UK government is perfectly willing to engage in brutal political suppression, but rarely has a need to? In that case maybe people are right to sound the alarm even though we haven't reached South American dictatorship levels yet.

You can see right here https://www.poderjudicial.es/search/AN/openDocument/766326fb...

> Are they defying the Spain government mandate?

Nobody has claimed that this is a government mandate, it isn't. It's a court order, coming from the judiciary. While Americans might consider the judiciary to be a branch of the government, in Spain it is considered entirely separate.

> Execute people on the spot, what the fuck are you even talking about?

The police will absolutely kill you if you try to forcefully resist them when they come to arrest you for violating a court order. This is not unique to Spain, but is more of a universal principle.

So, by your logic, russian censorship of media is ok too, just use a vpn, right? Chinese firewall? Just use a VPN! Turkey social media blackouts? VPN!

Non-aligned is China nowadays for what it's worth, given that UN turned into complete irrelevance, only thing left for them to do being grift.

Here's an overview. Be warned, the conclusion is:

> We enumerate the requirements that a censorship-resistant system must satisfy to successfully mimic another protocol and conclude that “unobservability by imitation” is a fundamentally flawed approach.

The way that I see it, its not just a technical problem anymore. It's about making the methods as diverse as possible and to some extent messing up the network for everyone. In other words, we should increase the cost and the collateral damage of widespread censorship. As an anecdotal data point, the network was quite tightly controlled / monitored around 2023 in Iran and nothing worked reliably. Eventually people (ab)used the network (for example the tls fragments method) to the extent that most of the useful and unrelated websites (e.g., anything behind cloudflare, most of the Hetzner IPv4 addresses, and more) stopped working or were blocked. This was an unacceptably high collateral damage for the censors (?), so they "eased" some of the restrictions. Vless and Trojan were the same at that time and didn't work or were blocked very quickly, but they started working ~reliably again until very recently.

[1] https://www.petsymposium.org/foci/

1. The government of Iran is an oppressive, immoral dictatorship.

2. Foreign intervention to try to remove it would likely result in worse outcomes, not better.

The IRGC and military are HUGE. This is a numbers thing, not a competence thing. Neither the US or Israel has the munitions to make a lasting dent with air power alone.