Different. Iran’s proposal would, if enacted, literally makes communications to the outside world impossible, since they are literally disconnecting the internet from the outside. It’s more like North Korea. In constrast, VPNs are still a thing in China… for now at least. Not every western site gets blocked. There’s a Chinese lemmy instance btw. Information flows in and out of China all the time.
Exactly, China filters their Internet. Just like Facebook and Twitter do. Instead of being at the whims of two rich individuals it’s at the whim of the government.
Not that one is better than the other, but US users experience the same (from a technical standpoint, not ideologically) kind of filtering but they’re not told that it is the great Zuck firewall or the great Elon firewall even though it is used in the same way to filter topics and ideas that the owner doesn’t like.
Exactly, China filters their Internet. Just like Facebook and Twitter do. Instead of being at the whims of two rich individuals it’s at the whim of the government.
Not that one is better than the other, but US users experience the same (from a technical standpoint, not ideologically) kind of filtering but they’re not told that it is the great Zuck firewall or the great Elon firewall even though it is used in the same way to filter topics and ideas that the owner doesn’t like.
The US doesn’t really block VPNs or many websites. I can access Baidu and QQ stuff in the US without a VPN. My parents regularly use WeChat here in the US without a VPN. In contrast, in China you can’t access a lot of western sites like Facebook/Twitter/Wikipedia, and, intermittently, Reddit, gets blocked without a VPN, and VPNs are much more difficult to obtain and use in China compared to the US.
As for Facebook/Twitter censorship, that’s on the people. They could easily switch to alternative platforms without using any VPNs but they just choose not to.
Different. Iran’s proposal would, if enacted, literally makes communications to the outside world impossible, since they are literally disconnecting the internet from the outside. It’s more like North Korea. In constrast, VPNs are still a thing in China… for now at least. Not every western site gets blocked. There’s a Chinese lemmy instance btw. Information flows in and out of China all the time.
Exactly, China filters their Internet. Just like Facebook and Twitter do. Instead of being at the whims of two rich individuals it’s at the whim of the government.
Not that one is better than the other, but US users experience the same (from a technical standpoint, not ideologically) kind of filtering but they’re not told that it is the great Zuck firewall or the great Elon firewall even though it is used in the same way to filter topics and ideas that the owner doesn’t like.
The US doesn’t really block VPNs or many websites. I can access Baidu and QQ stuff in the US without a VPN. My parents regularly use WeChat here in the US without a VPN. In contrast, in China you can’t access a lot of western sites like Facebook/Twitter/Wikipedia, and, intermittently, Reddit, gets blocked without a VPN, and VPNs are much more difficult to obtain and use in China compared to the US.
As for Facebook/Twitter censorship, that’s on the people. They could easily switch to alternative platforms without using any VPNs but they just choose not to.