> Heh, lucky you, at least you get a message. My ISP just drops traffic to the affected IPs. No ping, no traceroute, just a spinner in the browser until it says "page not found".

This is generally how the GFW works in China. Instead of an overbearing nanny like a school or corporation's DNS blocker, you're left with a sense that you're on a version of the Internet that is just intermittently and somewhat mysteriously broken.

And indeed, in China, a lot of things that probably aren't fully intended to be blocked are not reliably accessible. Implementation varies, so you get strange routing and peering issues. It feels like an Internet that isn't fully formed, that hasn't finished coming together yet.

Nation states and corporations obviously gain some things sometimes by having Internet censorship/blocking frameworks in place. Maybe, sometimes, ordinary people even benefit, too, if it helps shut down illegal and genuinely harmful businesses.

But it feels like the whole world is gradually trending towards more and more Internet censorship without realizing that we are un-building a miraculous thing that took enormous effort and cleverness and expense to build. I wish we could think about this not only in terms of freedom (and we absolutely should think about it in terms of freedom), but how we are disintegrating the infrastructure of communication and computing.