Just look for any VPNs that are advertised specifically for China, Russia, or Iran. These are the cutting edge tech, they may not be so privacy-friendly as Mullvad, but they will certainly work.
So the solution is no-name providers using random ad-hoc hackery, chosen according to a criterion more or less custom designed to lead you into watering hole attacks.
Right.
1) The problem is very difficult and requires a lot of engineering resources 2) It's very hard to make money in these countries for many reasons, including sanctions or the government restricting payments (Alipay, WeChatPay, etc)
The immediate response would be: "If the problem is so difficult, how can it be solved if not be well-known, well-established providers?"
The answer is simple: the crowdsourcing power of open source combined with billions of people with a huge incentive to get around government blocking.
Tor and I2P, for example, don't actually make money anywhere. Which is not to say that they work for any of the users in all of these places, or for all of the users in any of these places.
> The answer is simple: the crowdsourcing power of open source combined with billions of people with a huge incentive to get around government blocking.
The actual answer is that (a) they're using so many different weird approaches that the censors and/or secret police can't easily keep up with the whack-a-mole, and (b) they're relying on folklore and survivorship bias to tell them what "works", without really knowing when or how it might fail, or even whether it's already failing.
Oh, and most of them are playing for the limited stakes of being blocked, rather than for the larger stakes of being arrested. Or at least they think they are.
Maybe that's "solving" it, maybe not.
Tor is great, and they do great research on censorship circumvention, but it isn't used at any significant scale in these countries.