Does the Internet Route Around Damage? – Baltic Sea Cable Cuts

By the way, the original adage from John Gilmore ("The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it") was referring to a behavior of Usenet rather than of the Internet. In particular, if articles didn't reach a node by one path, the node would still accept that they were missing (according to Usenet routing rules) and accept those articles from a different path. Thus, one could not prevent Usenet messages or newsgroups from reaching most of Usenet merely by deleting or not forwarding them on a single node. Another way of putting this is that the connectivity of Usenet was (in general though not everywhere) a web rather than a tree, and the Usenet software didn't assume that messages had to be forwarded along some particular path, if another path was available.

As with Jon Postel's maxim (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robustness_principle) people have also subsequently applied this to human behavior, not just the behavior of particular software.

There were ultimately more technically sophisticated means of censorship available on Usenet that were somewhat more effective.

I thought Gilmore was referring to the earlier idea that the Internet could survive a nuclear war. https://www.wired.com/story/h-bomb-and-the-internet/

I don't think there would have been a straightforward way to connect that to the effects of censorship.