How hard to censor is IPFS? It would be quite disappointing if we managed to switch everyone over to IPFS, and in the end, after all that effort (and the compromises we'd have to make compared to simply using centralized content), governments would remain quite effective at censoring IPFS content.
Could ISPs throttle or block IPFS content, for instance? The developers should start assuming some extremely aggressive environments, like China, and then go from there, because honestly, we don't know if 20 years from now a lot more governments would see China's censorship as a role model to follow. We're already seeing multiple countries in Europe considering it to stop "extremist content", the IPSs in Canada are now banding together to block pirated content, and the US is probably not going to be too far behind after the repeal of the net neutrality rules. And those are just the "democratic" countries. It's obviously much worse for Middle Eastern or African countries already.
So I just hope the IPFS developers will always try to develop the platform from an extreme resilience point of view.
A dev for Ethereum's Swarm, a similar project, wrote the following comparing with IPFS:
"Swarm has a very strong anti-censorship stance. It incentivizes content agnostic collective storage (block propagation/distribution scheme). Implements plausible deniability with implausible accountability through a combination of obfuscation and double masking (not currently done). IPFS believes that wider adoption warrants compromising on censorship by providing tools for blacklisting, source-filtering though using these is entirely voluntary."
From what I gathered by reading the whitepaper mass censorship is extremely hard to accomplish.
>Could ISPs throttle or block IPFS content, for instance?
They wouldn't know what was IPFS and what was regular encrypted TCP, the only way I can tell IPFS traffic apart in wireshark is the port number. Once ISPs start blockings random encrypted connections people will get mad when their games or other applications stop working.
If we are talking about bad actors in the IPFS network, I reccommend you read their whitepaper. They layout a clever karma based system for incentivizing nodes to help others and punishing nodes that misbehave.
> They wouldn't know what was IPFS and what was regular encrypted TCP
The extreme conclusion of state-sponsored censorship is not a black list or DPI. It is a white list. It is easy to restrict traffic to a small set of addresses that are rigorously monitored for any ability to proxy non-conforming traffic. Everything else would get dropped on the floor.
IPFS and the like sit too high in the OSI layers to combat state sponsored censorship in the long-run.
It makes me wonder what the target market is. If this ever got big, it would just trigger the next step in the arms race it is incapable of sustaining
I’d think it would support grafting in chunks of the merkle dag via usb drives, etc. Otherwise, I don’t understand the claims about disconnected operation and breaking the dependency on the internet backbone.
Could ISPs throttle or block IPFS content, for instance? The developers should start assuming some extremely aggressive environments, like China, and then go from there, because honestly, we don't know if 20 years from now a lot more governments would see China's censorship as a role model to follow. We're already seeing multiple countries in Europe considering it to stop "extremist content", the IPSs in Canada are now banding together to block pirated content, and the US is probably not going to be too far behind after the repeal of the net neutrality rules. And those are just the "democratic" countries. It's obviously much worse for Middle Eastern or African countries already.
So I just hope the IPFS developers will always try to develop the platform from an extreme resilience point of view.