Someone in Dalat could teach Vietnamese to any number of foreigners, without any adversary being the wiser. Anyone in China could read up on Tiannenmen Square or the “Free Tibet” movement without fear of arrest. People in Indonesia could watch any film they wish.
“Laws” in any country on this planet are not immutable, immaculate/divine, absolute, or axiomatic. They can and should be changed — regardless of the concerns of those in power. And the only reliable way to ensure change is education, information and discussion — all unfettered, uncensored and unbridled.
Until technology guarantees that, we as ‘techies’ have not delivered. And please, don’t tell me about Tor and “teh darkwubs” — that is not a realistic solution for 99% of the online population — too slow and still not bulletproof.
Technology needs to do better.
As for tor and the dark web, more important than being fast & solid is ease of use. If we design platforms, protocols, etc by default to be censorship free, then many projects to fill gaps will follow. Tor was an attempt, but failed at widespread adoption, maybe we need something smaller to begin with. E2E encrypted chat apps was a good first step, we need more.
We take many things here in the US for granted. When I go back to my home country, I feel odd sense of insecurity, now imagine people living there for their whole lives - they take censorship as normal and go with it. With censorship comes with censored imaginations, research and so on.
Any system sufficiently user-friendly to be accessible to the bulk of the global populace is also user-friendly to government authority. Because inevitably, passwords get misplaced and authentication / authorization tokens get forgotten or stolen, and then the average user needs an authority to turn to to re-establish their connection to the network.
Similarly, if internet was designed with privacy in mind, things would have been different. If your favorite news site were available through tor, and you were using nontracking browser, you'd probably be fine.
It's clearly not a technical problem, so it's foolish to try to find a technical solution. This kind of silicon valley elitist Tellerism is doing more harm than good in cases like these.