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Comment by rob05c | Hacker News Reader

I fear Tyrannical Governments will create an "American Internet," a "Chinese Internet," a "European Internet," and a "Rest-of-the-world Internet."

It will happen quietly, and no one outside the tech community will know until it's too late.

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If that's the worst case scenario we're doing pretty OK. The nationalist networks will presumably be like the PSTN in the 90s: ubiquitous, reliable, safe but perceived as safer than it is, overpriced, limited, behind. All the interesting stuff will happen over tunnels to the Internet Internet.

Well, it depends how they do it, right? If they just block DNS, yeah, people who care can simply tunnel out. It still hurts, as the average non-caring citizen's knowledge is stunted. But not as badly.

If they block IPs, and closely monitor outgoing tunnels? Then it's a lot harder to get out.

I suspect you're right, they'll probably just block DNS and the worst IPs. It's easier, and DNS gets the 99%. Even The Great Firewall only blocks the 'worst' IPs (like Twitter).

I actually like this future more and more as it implies the opportunity to rebuild a new internet on top of the old internet with all the lessons learned from the first internet. It's not that the first will cease to exist. There are too many vested commercial interests for that to happen. The second internet will have the opportunity to develop separate from these commercial and government interests and will hopefully be better designed to protect against the shortcomings that left the first internet vulnerable to government meddling. Even if it takes us 10-20 years to get there, it will be worth it.

> It still hurts, as the average non-caring citizen's knowledge is stunted. But not as badly.

"As long as it's not me that's hurt, that's okay."

> "As long as it's not me that's hurt, that's okay."

Totally not what I was saying.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man

The Great Firewall does a lot more than that. It blocks new IPs by default (some are later re-enabled after being 'assessed' in some way).

It does some kind of automated crawling and blocking.

It has manual (as in human) blockers, who read content on Weibo and remove it.

It's still horribly crude, and fairly straight forward to route around but it's more complex than a simple static dns blacklist.

Right. It also does DNS poisoning, URL word analysing, deep packet inspection, and VPN identification & blocking. I meant it only directly blocks the worst IPs, as opposed to directly blocking all external IPs.

I do wonder whether a US Firewall will be worse or better than China's. On one hand, the US is presumably less autocratic. On the other, we have 10x the defense resources.

My little theory is that this can help Europe to become a player in the Internet. The point is that individual European countries cannot create their own internet - they are too small and too much interconnected (especially if they are in the European Union) - but on the other hand they are separate countries. The effect I would like to see is that they develop ways how to be trustworthy and also how to check if your partner is reliable. First between themselves - then their solutions will be attractive to the whole world. Which router would you trust - one from China, one from the USA or one from Germany - when you know that Germany also exports the routers to France and UK and they check them?

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