>They’re simply not capable of such things.

Google and Facebook are not cutting edge technologies. They are in the position of IBM in the 80s and Microsoft in the 90s, a legacy technology with huge market share being able to charge monopoly prices. A home grown alternative to google search is not beyond any university with a 100m budget.

What if I told you the government hasn’t been capable of moving away from IBM, SAP, Oracle, SAP or Microsoft yet ;)

What if I told you that North Korea has their own OS?

Id say that Australia isn’t. A dictatorship

> piracy website DNS entries removed

I admit I hardly visit pirate sites, but I didn't even notice that happen. I just checked and the Pirate Bay is still available so I don't know what they're even blocking.

e.g. 1337x.to, limetorrents.cc and torrentking.eu bring up an "access blocked" page. "Access to this site has been blocked by an order of the Federal Court of Australia" etc.

https://thepiratebay.org is working fine for me today, although I'm sure that address hadn't worked for a while until very recently, and it wasn't the same sort of blocking as those above.

I have a new computer. On my old one I changed to Google DNS when a lot of torrent sites were being blocked a few years ago, and suddenly they all worked again. Kind of silly saying access is blocked when changing one number on the computer unblocks them all.

Those 3 all work for me (well the 3rd one gives a Cloudflare error at https://torrentrex.com/, not a DNS black hole). I am based in Sydney with my ISP's own DNS (Aussie BB).

I think I read somewhere that smaller ISPs aren’t required to implement the restrictions, Presumably they might choose to not manage their own dns servers thus significant overhead. but I could be wrong.

Tpb is definitely blocked, I didn’t notice for ages but turns out I was always overriding my ISP DNS and using google dns which for some reason doesn’t block it, I’ve since moved to cloudflare who are in the same boat.

It doesn’t need to replace fb or google, only the functions it uses and provide an extensible set of tech for locals to develop solutions as needed. Still a massive undertaking but more reasonable.