The idea is you force them to choose the entire effective internet or nothing, which is not an economic self own even most dictatorships are willing to make.
These firewalls are an exercise in having your cake and eating it too.
These firewalls are an exercise in having your cake and eating it too.
And we know this is what will happen as this is effectively what happened with domain fronting--where you simply use the wrong SNI instead of hiding it entirely--with all the large CDNs actively "fixing" this feature to prevent their customer's websites from being blocked by firewalls because of users who were using this to get around hostname restrictions.
Thankfully? in the case of Iran, many customers do not want to interact with Iran because of US export regulations, so if it breaks that, all the better ironically enough.
China, on the other hand... That's where it starts getting interesting. There's already been several prominent examples of companies self-censoring to appease the Chinese government.
What basis do you have for this claim? People make these claims constantly so confidently, but wherever I look all I see is that dictators have always been willing to make their nations incredibly poor.
> These firewalls are an exercise in having your cake and eating it too.
More to the point this isn't the Gordian Knot you think it is.
HTTPS isn't designed to prevent this. If you want to allow 'legitmate' access you just issues your own certs, and proxy requests. Universities etc can install your root cert and use your DNS servers.
So your assumption that “dictators will do the worst they can” is wrong. They will keep pushing the boundary outside the current Overton window but can’t do it in a snap. You force their hand by not providing alternatives and suddenly they’re stuck. They can’t just restrict feminist websites and claim that it is harming the social fabric then expand the net slowly. It is all or nothing as the OP explains.
In dictatorships where they need the populace, then they are in a tough spot, because the only way you get rich is having a developed population productive enough to tax, which you see in Singapore, China, Dubai and Iran somewhat.
It is this kind of authoritarian regime that needs the internet, but also wishes they didn't need the internet in the case of Iran and China.
CGP gray has a great youtube video summary explaining this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs
So in essence, this is a positive move because even dictators willing to destroy their countries for power will have to make a choice on internet access well before they gain enough power to cut it off entirely.
Iran lost $17 billion in economic activity by cutting off the entire internet a few years ago for a week. They have not done that this time, making internet outages at specific times of day, etc.
Eventually, we'll end up with either uncensorable technology or a totalitarian government.
Also I'm not well-educated in that area, but I would expect that CDNs would allocate dedicated IP ranged for big customers like Microsoft or Apple. So state can ban more selectively, white-listing those ranges.