Technology

IPFS is pretty neat (though I think bittorrent is better due to content locality and speed, but that's just my experience). I'm more talking about starting up hardware for alternate network paths - for instance, chained together wireless or wired routers - outside the existing internet backbone to get across the borders of these countries that want to cut off the internet nya

Presumably, you'd do this in combination with some kind of mesh network router (like yggdrasil) capable of organising discrete connections into a proper network without a central authority, so that many people can autonomously build up this kind of alternate routing backbone.

Basically, right now, anti-censorship efforts are in a constant back-and-forth war between censors and the anti-censorship groups. This is because it is far too costly for a country to completely blackout communication from the wider internet, at the minute, but many of the countries doing this are continuously working to make that more viable. However, should it become viable for a country to disconnect all cables linking their internet to the outside internet, they have the technical means to do it by physically cutting the cables.

They know where the cables are and control them - that is part of how the censorship is implemented after all nya. Current censorship resistance techniques essentially are an armsrace between trying to make it so their filters don't detect your "forbidden" connections, and the censors trying to improve their filters without unacceptable levels of economic and social damage (see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collateral_freedom)

The less their economy and population depends on external services, the more aggressive and broad-spectrum they can be in cutting off external connections, because the harm from the collateral damage is reduced. What these countries want to do is reach a point where the collateral damage from cutting off the wider internet is small enough that they can cut the cables and block all connections. You can't actually evade that within the current model of censorship/filtering resistance, because at that point it's basically like those connections don't even exist and hence can't be traversed by any mechanism nya.

What I'm proposing is we build alternate pathways out that don't depend on these cables. For example, either our own cables, or a chain of wireless nodes capable of building paths through the network autonomously (this is what a meshnet is). Because these alternate routes out would not be state-controlled, and presumably operated in a distributed manner which is hard for the state to locate, censorship becomes physically impossible without essentially containing your entire country in a sphere of RF interference (which would destroy basically all modern life), and building a massive, constantly monitored perimeter of sufficient depth to check that no-one has laid secret cables or whatever.

One other example of a potential route out is Starlink-style satellite internet, except a mesh network of satellites rather than it being controlled by any singular entity. But that's essentially a larger-scale version of the "massive number of small-scale wireless nodes" idea. Hell, to improve censorship resistance you could do something with Li-Fi networking too, or mixed cable-wireless networks, or anything. The most important part is that you can build routes in- and out- of a country that the country's government can't easily locate or shut down ^.^