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Tell me what you do if only registered messenger services are allowed, that run on phones with intact boot loaders?
Then forbid any peer to peer connection that wasn't requested by those services.
No VPNs, no unlicensed servers.
There can be a free internet in Africa but Europe can be locked down more than China if so desired.
You do know that cryptography predates computers right? Anything that can send text can be used to send encrypted messages, don't believe me? Here you go:
There's no way you will be able to read the message above unless I give you the key for it. How would they stop me from sending that?
Also, are they going to firewall my VPS? What about my personal server? What if we use text files on my personal server, using ssh keys to connect to it? There's no way to block all cryptographed communication without blocking all communication.
If you can only send facebook messages, facebook can block anything with more than 5 random characters.
VPS - virtual private server? The server is behind a router. Of course it can be firewalled. It's also on a host server so all your files can be read without you noticing.
Everything can be blocked by default and only AI monitored channels from official services can be accepted. Short messages can be hidden with crypto tricks but that is a very limited freedom for very few people.
Congrats, you now blocked people from sharing urls, setting their delivery address on areas where code has numbers, or prevented people from communicating in a different languages or using slangs since it's impossible to keep track of all of that. Also are you blocking images too? Otherwise you can put text in the image in several different ways.
I also mentioned my home server, but in case you didn't knew you can encrypt files on a VPS, sure there are attacks to access the contents when they're being decrypted by the VPS, but there are lots of ways to have the server send the content encrypted and only decrypt it locally.
How would AI know the difference between "hey check this video " and "hey check this video "? Or even "see you at the party tomorrow" and "see you at the party tomorrow" (i.e. the secret meeting will be tomorrow). Cryptography is so much more than just making your messages look like random characters, hell, using AI it's very possible to have it write a text that uses all of the random letters on a gpg encrypted message in a specific way that others can decrypt, but since hose are still random characters it's impossible to know there's a message there.
They can check the url.
From where does the server get the content if every port is blocked but from licensed servers? You could contact them directly.
It doesn't have to. People can still meet offline and share secrets. It's enough to limit the amount of secret communication. It's enough if people cannot share books and videos in secret.
And do what? The URL might be invalid because it was temporary, or it could be a valid url that has a message in it, it's impossible to know if the random characters in a girl are random or have a meaning behind.
How do you think that would work? My server has an IP, I control the ports on that machine. Sure, my ISP could try to block me by putting me inside a LAN or something so I don't have access to the internet IP, but packages have to make it from and to my computer, so a path must be established, and where there's a path you can do all sort of fun stuff with it, such as reverse shells or proxies. At the end of the day you can't block stuff unless you block everything.
You haven't proposed any solution to the sharing of videos of books, hell, you can share pirated movies on Facebook if you want to without them knowing by taking a page from usenet and encoding the video in text and publishing it on several different pages and sharing an external file linking all of them together. Add an extra layer that uses AI to convert each post into something that sounds reasonable and no post in particular would raise any alarm, and even looking at all of them together nothing makes sense, unless you know the order and the key to decrypt it.
unless only licensed companies are allowed to have servers.
Usenet didn't track who was reading those pages. One video can be shared, 10 exposes the people who are going to receive a visit from ICE.
One text can be shared, 100 will be detected. Facebook has data centers, while that layer has to run on a computer graphics card.
Remember the Windows 11 secure boot requirement. Soon most motherboards will require Windows. Only a selected few will have access to private AI.
It's easier to prevent fascism now than to undo it once it is established. There will be no virtual nerd freedom oasis.
I’d not use them?
How exactly would you get that implemented?
At each router, store the allowed subnets of acceptable servers and dop any other connection. So P2P is blocked by default. But if a connection is needed, the messenger services get an API to unlock routes for channels that they control.
I think you are vastly overestimating what anyone can do.
All telecom providers can be required by law to implement it and Cisco and the other router suppliers can add that feature to their operating systems, if they not already have for countries like China.
The free internet can become a sandbox in a matter of weeks, maybe even days or hours.
The illusion of freedom is too valuable to be destroyed unnecessarily. But if people start to do serious protests I would expect the internet to go down like in Türkiye.