That's actually just how the Internet is. Nothing to do with the great firewall.
These were ripe with espionage, wiretapping and sabotage. Access to it used to be highly restricted as well, up until the 90s for example you were only allowed to connect government-licensed modems to the German PSTN directly.
Just like today's Internet. BGP spoofing, CALEA, DDoS.
> Access to it used to be highly restricted as well ...
And this is where the regression or "downfall" is beginning. Access to the Internet (as in ability to send/receive arbitrary data to the wider Internet) is something I bet is going to be increasingly restricted, but most people won't notice because they don't understand the difference between apps and the Internet.
I'd be surprised if direct access to the Internet is possible for consumers in the next 10 years. Everything will have to be through approved apps (age assurance is going to be the catalyst) that work over registered tunnels contracted through ISPs, if there isn't an outright blurring or merger between the concepts of phone/CPE, ISP and CDN. Your non-tech layperson will not know any difference whatsoever if all they use are their phone plan, streaming/banking apps and Facebook.
This was the same in many places. The cost of hardware and connection time limited connections, and no one had cryptography except the government and ultra nerds.
The counter-reaction to this era will include additional communication control.
Oh boy, an excuse to share my favourite great firewall story on a visit to China. Keep in mind, this is 15 years old, so probably doesn't represent the current state of affairs. At the time, my daily news reading habit had me checking BBC and CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation). The BBC site seemed to be working fine, but whenever I clicked on an article on CBC, it was blocked. A few minutes later, I went to show my wife that CBC articles were blocked, and I clicked on the same one again, and it loaded. I clicked on another: blocked. Tried it again after a few minutes and it loaded. Someone was screening the articles in real time for me. When I was done reading, I clicked on several of the weirdest headlines I could find, and after a few minutes, everything was blocked again including ones that had previously worked.
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.