Ask HN: Is it technically possible to evade big-tech censorship?
First of all, sad to see you start your post with that Trump-disavowment, it makes me wonder whatever happened with the willingness to defend other&#x27;s right to free speech no matter whether the defender agrees with that speech or not.<p>As to the possibility to evade censorship the answer depends on how censorious tech really gets. Evading customer-facing Twitter, Facebook, Google, Microsoft is not that hard, all it takes it not to use their services - I don&#x27;t, for one. That is level 1, easily beaten. Level 2 is what Amazon just did to Parler in that they terminated their hosting contract and with that - due to Parler&#x27;s lack of robustness - taking it off the &#x27;net. They complain that they can not use any of the other hosting providers since all those big enough to host them are unwilling to take their business, I don&#x27;t know whether this is true or not but being refused back-end services is the essence of level 2 of the cancellation scale which I just made up. To take Parler as an example I&#x27;d suggest they could just buy some servers, hook them up to a power supply and get a few speedy connections to the &#x27;net to be back in business... until those IAPs start refusing to offer them connectivity. That would be level 3, more or less. There are many IAPs and it is hard to see how all of them would be unwilling to provide connectivity so even that type of cancellation would be circumventable... until ISPs start blocking their user&#x27;s access to your services. They can do that clumsily by blocking DNS requests, they can do it in a more thorough way by blocking actual connectivity by blocking your IP ranges (remember that you are using your own hardware at this time so you won&#x27;t be sharing IP space with others). The more tenacious ISPs can start blocking any and all access, even for those who are smart enough to use proxies to get around the IP blocks by using DPI to examine what those pesky customers are doing. Such ISPs should get their feet grilled by the likes of the EFF but as to whether that would happen remains to be seen. Be that as it may, this is more or less level 4. Level 5 would be a similar DPI treatment by backbone providers, blocking any and all access through regular means. This would be horrendously inefficient, expensive and invasive so I don&#x27;t know whether this is a realistic scenario.<p>And then, after all that cancelling and blocking frenzy... you get to launch your services on top of IPFS or a similar dark network. If your service is popular people will flock to it. If IPFS does not cut it there are other dark networks, all with their own pros and cons. As long as there is a way to pass traffic from customer A to customer B there is a way to create a digital Samizdat, it won&#x27;t be fast but it will work. You won&#x27;t be streaming video, you won&#x27;t be proclaiming the revolution in a live 4K stream but you will be able to reach your targets.