If something like this was in widespread use it would have much more impact since countries would see whole swathes of the internet immediately go dark when they make stupid laws.
This is a dangerous precedent though that IMO everyone should fight against.
It's how we get the balkanization of the internet, and the death of it as a global network.
TBH we also shouldn't put the onus on blocking "unsafe" countries on the website owners, nor an intermediary like CloudFlare. If a nation wants to block certain content, let the nation deal with it by getting their own ISPs to block and make sure the citizen's anger gets correctly placed on their government and not the site operators.
I don’t really understand comments like these. Even if you’re exactly right about how it should work, how would you make this happen in the world we live in? Neither the tech community nor ISPs nor cloud companies decide these things. Just because a matter affects us doesn’t mean we have much of a voice in it especially if it’s legal.
Laws about tech are decided by (idiot) politicians/parties/governments and the consequences are enforced by massive fines, imprisonment, etc. by law enforcement and selective (and often politically motivated) prosecution. In some of the worst places the consequences could include death.
Afghanistan just lost access to the internet almost entirely. China and North Korea are famous for their firewalls. Much of Asia has internet blackouts whenever there are large scale protests. The western world’s government has more legal jurisdiction/economic influence on the companies that run these things and are increasingly leveraging that for their desired censorship.
If the answer to this is democratic influence, the populations of many countries don’t really have that, the majorities in countries that do have it certainly doesn’t know or care about these things and wouldn’t vote for the pro-censorship politicians in the first place if they’d then vote to cut off their nation’s access to uncensored internet while preserving the uncensored variants, and even if the majority ever did care to get the system to work in this way there’s a global trend away from having their opinions on such things matter anyway.