Yes, i think Reddit shows a note saying content restricted in your country in response to a legal notice. And then it says geoblocked in India.

If a government has a great firewall installs its own root certificate on locally sold devices, it can pull all sorts of shenanigans.

Check out the CAs your browser trusts. It's a tire fire. People should be a lot more worried about corporate shenanigans than government.

One of the more interesting things you can do with a network tap is take a look at the certificates crossing the wire. Suricata has a tls-log section.

Are there known cases of this being done?

Lenovo, maybe: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/02/lenov...

Kazakhstan.

Sorry if this is a dumb question, but wouldn't it suffice to just ban the subreddits by their URL?

It's not a dumb question, since it's a natural assumption. But HTTPS - specifically HTTP over TLS - establishes the secure tunnel to the particular domain (reddit.com) first, and only then transmits elements of the HTTP protocol, such as the path, any query parameters, and so on.

I believe that TLS could be used (and is used) in combination with other protocols, which only require the domain to use for DNS. Everything after that in the URL bar is HTTP-only.

DNS over https solves the problem of plain text DNS. Firefox already supports it. Also check more about ESNI since ISPs like jio employ SNI inspection to block sites - https://www.cloudflare.com/learning/ssl/what-is-encrypted-sn...

Cloudflare has a small demo which you can use to test your browser and learn more about specific parts - https://www.cloudflare.com/ssl/encrypted-sni/

I use https://getintra.org on Android and point it to a recursive DoH resolver running on Cloudflare Workers (free tier has been more than enough for 3 devices worth of queries).

Quick tutorial from StackPath (much of it applies to Cloudflare Workers, too): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19514791

The government could technically do that (and worse) if they controlled the browser. China for instance have a few popular browsers (owned by Tencent, Alibaba, Xiaomi, and Qihoo 360) that made it impossible to either view a GitHub repo or perform certain actions, such as starring it. Imagine them rewriting Wikipedia articles to spread propaganda, or modify a download url to point to a cracked version that infect your device with RAT, etc).

I’m not familiar with the browser situation in India, but it’s yet another reason why we should recommend and support Firefox, and why we should avoid software and hardware from authoritarian countries.

Or a protocol downgrade attack. Many possible ways.

Pretty sure a downgrade is theoretically impossible currently (unless you're exploiting a zero day)