What are the alternatives if this gets implemented at the ISP level? Wouldn’t the online anonymity dead?
Discussion
#tor drills tunnels through most censorship. Using a snowflake proxy, your ISP will just see a websockets connection to some innocent site outside your borders.
The Great Firewall of China is far most sophisticated than anything an EU government could hope to build, and tor can still penetrate it most of the time.
For quite sometime now I have been thinking that the way they're going to nullify tools like Tor (and potentially Bitcoin) is not blocking, but whitelisting. Your ISP will simply not allow that connection to to an "innocent site outside your borders".
I lack the specific technical knowledge to know how exactly that will work but that's the route I would have my scientists explore if I were one of these totalitarian pieces of shit in power. My intuition is that AI + increased processing power + measures like this one extending KYC-AML to everything that online, indicate that's what their thinking too actually.
That would work, and I'm worried about that, too.
They would HAVE to go all-in on it, because a single proxy "inside" grants access to everything outside (as I was fond of showing my high school friends).
But for a country that doesn't value / actively hates new business startups, restricting all packets to a whitelist is doable. Economically damaging, yes, but much much less than a full "grid down" order like we've seen in recent years in Kashmir, Tigray, Gaza etc
Ah, but that's why we have things like the EU, China and the US. To make the cage look ample.