Comment by blackeyeblitzar
8 months ago
Is there some decentralized anti-censorship technology that can prevent this type of action, where ISPs and DNS providers and other points of centralization are forced to implement things on behalf of other parties (like Canal+ or a government)?
Well there are a couple of ways one can do this!
1. Recursively lookup DNS, so domains will have to be blocked at the registrar level, since DNS is unencrypted, it can be blocked at ISP level as well.
2. Use a protocol alternative to DNS, a good mature example is GNS. It aims to replace DNS, with a built from group up, modernish protocol. Using a DHT and public-key cryptography.
3. There are "block chain" solutions to the whole domain problem, look at Handshake, ENS etc.
No.
No matter how decentralized something is, ultimately you need to have a server and cables connecting it to the internet located somewhere. That somewhere will be within some legal entity or sovereign's jurisdiction which you must answer to and comply with.
As long as the protocol is easy to detect and block.
If whatever technology that is being used is so intertwined into the base of all use cases (including totally legal) and legal vs. illegal is practically indistinguishable at scale, then decentralization cannot be blocked without physically blocking all the legal use cases too: sure they can "cut cables" but it will have much more greater consequences as they have just cut cables connecting all the legal activity too.
I mean, this is literally a case of killing off the general infrastructure to stop illegal activities.
DNS can be used for both legal and illegal purposes, and the French courts authorized dropping nukes on them to stop illegal activities with no damns given to the legal because the laws cited provided no such safeguards or reservations.
Have you ever used Tor?
Decentralized and global consensus are contradictory properties, in order to have an otherwise arbitrary ASCII string resolve to a particular machine EVERYWHERE, you need a central authority to say who's who.
If you just want to prevent other central authorities (e.g. France) from barging in on the existing central authorities your computer expects to get answers from (e.g. ICANN, Verisign etc) there are plenty of projects for semiuncensoring DNS in a distributed way. But nobody is stopping, say, the US from doing to ICANN or Verisign what France is doing to CloudFlare and Google.
> Decentralized and global consensus are contradictory properties
That's literally what blockchain solves. ENS (Ethereum Naming Service) already does this.
The ethereum block chain is centralized - it may not have a geographical location, but there's still only one of it. In a global partition there become zero of it (only two incorrect fragments), not two of it.
Other people have even argued that blockchains are states - as in governments, not as in distributed state replication protocols.