The internet doesn't interpret anything - it's a just a bunch of networks and technologies to pass packets around with some level of redundancy (originally to withstand nuclear strikes on the comms centers).

It’s a metaphor.

Ok sure but if router rules say “send these packets over there” that’s where they will go (to die). There are no way to “interpret” if the packets are going to the right destination for downstream devices which are totally oblivious to this process if that makes sense

What you are homing in on is the problem of trust.

And yes. It is a problem. If your upstream does skulduggerous things, you can't "route around it" from the standpoint of being an endpoint. Your packets will go where your ISP says they go.

Unless...

You take a bit of the routing decision out of their hands, which takes a bit of footwork on your part. For instance, setting up a VPN to a network zone unpolluted by the faulty prefix announcement, which is basically going to be any non downstream of the hostile ISP provider.

Once you're out of that routing zone, normal network visibility is restored. Odds are even a national scale backbone provider is not going to be able to effectively block traffic that's routing out to a proxy, so all the the ISP has really done is made life more difficult for people unaware of how to set up such an arrangement.

Which now that you know about this, it is your duty to spread the knowledge of how to do so far and wide. If someone wants to block it, then that's all the justification needed for frustrating those efforts.

VPN traffic is trivially blocked at the ISP level which has been proven by china, russia and others. So no you can't really prevent mass censorship with technology.

And trivially circumvented, which has been proven by Tor. https://support.torproject.org/censorship/connecting-from-ch...

Lol trivial as in running your own bridge outside of great firewall?

As is stated in the link I posted, you don't have to run your own bridge. With snowflake, there are more entry nodes than ever, and you don't need to know anything about them in advance.

Yes and it’s been classified and blocked before (though not for long). Eventually they will just start blocking fastly completely or whoever else will agree to domain front them and that’s that

Snowflake isn't dependent on domain fronting like Meek-Azure. It works, so why the defeatist "may not even try" attitude?

TBH, that is a quote from several decades ago that hasn't kept up with modern censoring technology. When Gilmore originally coined it he was embroiled in a legal dispute with his ISP, I doubt he had BGP hijacks by national governments in mind.

The original comment was a remark on Usenet newsgroup message filtering. Usenet had a degree of decentralization, a single news server couldn't control the entire network. If the message is filtered at a particular path by a server, at least some other nodes would still receive their own copies via an alternative path, which may then propagate the messages further downstream.

Today's highly-centralized server-client Web architecture does not have this property. Some P2P protocols are closer to the spirit of this quote.

Conclusion: architecture of "the Net" matters a lot (the original quote didn't use the term "Internet").

Seeing as how the entire internet doesn't still block youtube: no. It routed around it.

The quote has nothing to do with automatically and invisibly routing around censorship, e.g. a techno-system that somehow always works to oppose censorship. It's just that people will reconnect stuff eventually, bypassing any block somehow. At worst there are always sneakernets.