How will this work with chat control?
> "If Ofcom doesn't think this will be enough to prevent significant harm, it can even ask that ISPs be ordered to block UK access."
If you want to enforce stupid laws the burden should be upon you.
which might be the end goal - the internet, with freedom of communication, is a way that the plebs can organize and resist authoritarianism. And as countries are growing increasingly authoritarian (and i include UK here), they may be planning on preventing the old free internet that has enabled so much.
So as technologists here at HN, there needs to be a pre-emptive strike to prevent such an outcome from becoming successful. I would have said TOR, but for most people it's a non-starter. What other options are there?
Not for the masses and not sustainabl,
It's always easier to have a paper say "do this" than finding a tech to circumvent it.
Politics is fundamentally people business and involves lots of people who can't or won't understand the details of what is going on but who may still be interested in the end results.
So the lack of ability to solve this politically has made technological solution the only out.
The problem is when tech people try apply tech to political problems crudely, without understanding or without caring about the human aspect of it. You need sociologists and political scientists to study what impact a technology will actually have, and normal people to see how they feel about it, not just programmers who may incorrectly assume that e.g. designing an open and secure protocol will automatically and directly map to creating an open and secure society.
For example, in this case, the blunt approach is "How do we design a protocol that can't be censored/monitored?" The answer is TOR, which as parent comment noted, is socially a non-starter. But maybe a better approach could be, "How do we design a protocol which removes the incentives/makes it politically untenable for people to censor/monitor it?"
One way you might approach this is to create a system that's organically useless for bad actors. Clearly different platforms have different levels of "safe" and "awful", due to their structure. Could we design a platform with such strong prosocial incentives that authoritarians are not able to fearmonger about it?
Another approach could be to chain common citizen rights to authoritarian interests. For example, the US government cannot backdoor AES, because doing so would also compromise their own communciations. Can we make it so authoritarians are forced onto the same boat as us for our other communication technologies too, and therefore disincentivized from weakening our privacy because doing so would damage theirs too?
ActivityPub, ATProto, and blockchain could also be seen as technologies that are designed to create a social structure that incentivizes specific political outcomes, with varying degrees of success.
It's people business. So you design around questions like "Where is this technology going to put different types of people, and how are they going to feel about that?"