People have said for decades that governments can't control Internet content because people will help each other circumvent the restrictions by technical means. I've found that very inspiring and have personally tried to join in.

But I notice (maybe especially on this day of the TikTok ban) that lots of people at least sometimes sympathize with the idea that the governments have good reasons to restrict information. And not that many people anywhere have ever used censorship circumvention technologies.

So you might say "the more you tighten your grip, Tarkin, the more star systems will slip through your fingers" or something, but the cultural will and momentum to work around Internet-balkanizing measures is ... not that massive and not that universal.

I don't mean to say that people working around geographic blocking doesn't happen ... it does to some noticeable extent at least for licensed streaming, for gambling, and for porn. But I guess significant majorities typically say "oh well!" and accept restrictions as the new normal.

Well it's certainly at the whims of a network-effect, that's part of the reason alcohol prohibition was so insanely ineffective. There was more people who wanted alcohol than the ban could possibly handle.

I'd posit that indoor smoking bans wouldn't have been effective whatsoever if they were implemented in the 1970's rather than the 2000s, just for the simple fact that 40% of the population were smokers compared to around 20% when those bans came into effect. Additionally, the impact to smokers was that you needed to go outside to smoke, which is a pretty reasonable behavioral modification.

There's probably some really solid sociology based studies around where this prohibition effectiveness essentially falls apart.

Yeah, the TikTok ban isn't about restricting content for US users, it's about restricting the data vacuum that is the PRC. TikTok has already been banned for Govmnt employees for years. And, for good reason.

Sometimes, we have to remind ourselves that our government is not the bad guy. The bad guys are the bad guys; and those bad guys aren't often bad to their own kind.

It's pretty obvious the tiktok ban was due to the Israel-Palestine conflict and thus is about restricting US users. It literally got passed in the same bill as Israel funding too.

I actually hadn't heard this theory until I read it on Wikipedia about an hour before your reply. I don't think the "same bill as Israel funding" is enough to make this obvious without other context, though: after all, that same bill includes military funding for Taiwan and Ukraine, too, and combining them was largely a parliamentary tactic to make it harder for legislators to oppose portions of the combined bill, not an acknowledgement that they all dealt with exactly the same subject.

(You might still be right, I just don't think it's "pretty obvious".)

Same bill as Israel funding is not my argument, it's just something to note. If you dig into this, you will find lots of public statements or comments made by ADL and related organizations about tiktok's influence on gen z opinions of the conflict, since tiktok doesn't ban pro palestine content or videos of civilian killings by IDF like all of the other big social networks do. Couple of weeks later, the ban is introduced and few weeks later the bill is passed. This is as pretty obvious as it can possibly be.