Africa's Worst New Internet Censorship Law Could Be Coming to South Africa

Until recently many South African Apple device owners had Kenya accounts to buy games (including most educational content) because of the Board's refusal to allow South African App Store games without rating every game itself (eventually they relented).

Home Affairs, which also handles citizenship and immigration, is a mess, and has made the South African passport worthless thanks to rampant corruption and incompetence (historically anyway- corruption may be improving a bit, but the damage is done).

Their latest trick: to require burdensome documentation from international travelers with children ostensibly to combat child trafficking (because of by dubious data from a lobby group that caught a Minister's ear). It's expected to severely dent the Sputh African tourism industry.

TlDr: Even if these proposed censorship regulations come to pass, it is unlikely that they will have much of an effect thanks to the incompetence of the would-be censors.

The sa government has a very mediocre understanding overall of how the technology that makes up the Internet works and likes to propose rather broad and technically unfeasable laws that inevitably are either ignored or eventually abandoned.

It wasn't that long ago that they expected any isp to be keeping packet logs of any traffic through thier network for a period of five years on the off chance that the police might need it. It took a fair bit of back and forth to get them to realize how absurd such an approach was.

I would expect that if this does come to pass and youtube is blocked etc, that even the most naïve user will suddenly discover what a vpn is and life will continue. ( never underestimate the technological capability of someone , including your grandmother, to find a way to watch thier cat videos on the Internet )

The idea here is: reasoning does not work. You reason for good things, against stupid laws, but you have no leverage. We'll have to walk thru pain, "fear and loathing", most of those laws will be passed somewhere, in a few years or decades they'll prove to not work. Then they will be gradually repelled. Now there will be leverage: "this law was tried in a country CCC and it went sour".

We humans actually suck at designing something (like laws). Our only bet is evolution. You can't reason. You can only show. So we'll have to try ideas even when it's obvious they're stupid.

But yes, this seems appropriate.

As others have mentioned if this actually became legitimate it would mean nothing. They have nobody to police this.