Comment by iamnothere

There is no answer except to sever yourself from the network. If you could somehow undo all of computing history and rebuild the internet on different principles, using completely locked down and centralized machines, then you could accomplish what you want to. But the tools to escape control are out there and are widely available. The skills to open new avenues outside of control are distributed among millions. The structure of the current network is woven into everything from banking to dishwashers.

You can make certain digital behavior illegal for your citizens, but enforcement is always going to be difficult. If you invasively spy on them to try and force them into your model digital behavior, it will cause unrest. If you try to block specific sites at the border, you will take down unrelated sites and breed contempt for the law. By pushing people farther and farther underground, you eventually connect them with organized crime and foreign governments.

In the long run, your insistence that the network be controlled is going to lead to either civil breakdown or totalitarianism. Perhaps that’s the inevitable consequence of connecting humanity as we’ve done. But I suspect that countries who are more digitally permissive will not face the same dilemma.

(Note that people usually accept laws where a victim can be identified. A digital crime with a real victim is still a crime, and standard policing methods can often track down the perpetrator. No need to break the internet for these cases.)