Is 4chan the perfect Pirate Bay poster child to justify wider UK site-blocking?

That's the thing, one day you won't be able to.

You'll only be able to connect to domains that have been bought with a state-issued ID and digitally signed. If you run afoul of the rules, you'll be taken down, fined, or worse.

The means to publish and consume will be taken from us.

"Trusted" computing. "You wouldn't download a car." "Think of the children". "Free speech allows hate."

Within a generation of complete and total control of communications, we will be slaves. Powerless, impotent, unable to organize, disposable fodder.

1984 is coming.

I've recently had a glimpse of that - buying my first .no domain required me to be registered on the Norwegian population register, and full digital verification. There was even a phone call with the registrar! Some of the other rules are bonkers too [1]:

- Each private individual may at any time subscribe to up to 5 domain names directly under .no

- Each organisation may at any time subscribe to up to 100 domain names directly under .no

[1]: https://www.norid.no/en/om-domenenavn/regelverk-for-no/

You don't connect to domains, you connect to IPs. You can resolve a domain to an IP however you want. And IPs can be shared or change regularly.

The convention is use DNS to resolve domains and DNS providers play by some rules, but if enough people start to dislike the rules you will start seeing unsanctioned DNS services and the like.

Another option is for browsers to consult a p2p DHT (just use the one for torrents) for a special class of domains (eg. https://[pubkey].dht). This is similar to how Tor does this but in this case you don't need to hide your server location because presumably it's located somewhere where the laws favor you.

IP blocking is a very different type of problem and one that would require hiring China as a consultant. And still be only marginally effective.

What was the point of the age check again?

What makes IP blocking so difficult, and why would China need to be brought in as a consultant? Does setting up such technologies exceed the capabilities or experience of Western engineers?

There's a reason we in Sweden has a nickname for Norway; "the last soviet state"

Is it wrong for Norway to protect its domain? They don't want the ".no" domain to be the target of "domain hacks" from people who have nothing to do with Norway.

So if you want a ".no" domain, prove that you are Norwegian, the limits are to prevent the kind of abuse we see in most other TLDs (domain squatting, etc...). All that seem reasonable to me. Some countries put less restrictions on their own TLDs, especially tiny countries with interesting TLDs which they see as a revenue source, that's fine too, but to each his own.

If you don't like it, use any of the generic TLDs. AFAIK, Norway doesn't put any restriction on them.

You're right, the Norwegian government can do whatever they want. And yes, the ability to stop domain squatting is a nice side effect. For me though, it was a pretty surprising process, and set of restrictions.

Life is full of tradeoffs and this is no exception. I quite like the .no TLD - I find it lends itself to fun product / side project names. It's just a pity that I'm limited to 5 with the .no TLD :)

The problem is that this causes problems when people then move out of Norway, which is not a need you can predict when choosing a domain. So yes, always choose gTLDs but that doesn't absolve .no from criticism.

The restrictions on not owning too many domains are reasonable if still too lax IMO.