How Governments and Authorities Restrict Access to the Internet
Internet censorship means blocking or filtering what people can reach online. The methods have names (DNS tampering, IP address blocking, URL filtering, packet inspection), but they all work the same way: the network looks at where your request is going and stops it.
Speedify is an app that encrypts your internet traffic and sends it through a Speedify server in another location, which takes that visibility away. Speedify also uses Wi-Fi, 4G/5G cellular, Ethernet, Starlink and satellite internet connections at the same time, so the page still loads fast. What follows explains each censorship method and where using Speedify fits.
Speedify reaches what the network blocks, at full speed
How the Internet Works: The Parts Censors Control
Before looking at how governments censor the internet, you need to understand how the internet works and which levers censors can pull. Here is a simplified example of you opening a website on a computer over an uncensored internet connection. These are the elements involved:
- Your Internet Service Provider (ISP): the company you use to connect to the internet, such as Comcast, Verizon, AT&T or Vodafone. An ISP provides internet connectivity to its customers through its infrastructure of servers, connections and networking equipment. Because your traffic passes through the ISP, the ISP can see it, and Verizon was once caught adding a hidden tracking tag to unencrypted web requests.
- Your Internet Protocol (IP) address: a unique address, like a postal address, assigned to you by your ISP. Your IP address identifies you and tells the network where to deliver information. Websites have IP addresses as well.
- The Domain Name System (DNS): matches IP addresses with human-readable “domain names” such as speedify.com.
- Numbered Ports are used within internet protocols for specific purposes. Each port can be assigned to a particular activity; for example, the default port for unencrypted web browsing (HTTP) is 80, and for HTTPS it is 443.
- The Gateways are a kind of large scale routers that allow ISPs to connect to the internet backbone, thus being able to communicate with each other.
- Network packets are the basic elements that form a flow of information. They are formatted units of data carried over the Internet.
Back to the example, here’s what happens when you type in “https://speedify.com”:
- Your computer sends the domain name request “speedify.com” to a selected DNS server, which resolves it, returning a message containing the IP address for the server that hosts the Speedify website.
- The browser sends a request to your ISP for a connection to that IP address.
- The request goes through a series of routers, each one forwarding a copy of the request to a router closer to the destination, until it reaches a router that finds the specific computer needed: the one that hosts the Speedify website.
Each router along the path is called a hop; the number of hops is the number of computers or routers your message comes in contact with along its way and is often between 5 and 30. - This computer sends information back to you, allowing your browser to send the full URL and receive the data to display the Speedify web page.
How Internet Censorship Works: Forms and Techniques
Internet censorship can manifest itself in various forms. These include:
- Filtering content: users can open the website or the app, but parts of it are missing, for example videos, embedded social media posts, or articles that include specific terms.
- Throttling the speed of specific content, for example streaming media.
- Restricting access to content: only specific users can reach certain content.
- Blocking content: users cannot open the website or use the app at all.
- Shutting down the internet altogether.
Say you want to open https://speedify.com from a country where the site is restricted. Here are the most commonly used technical strategies to keep online information from reaching users. These techniques apply not just to browsing but to apps, file transfers and every other Internet activity.
DNS filtering and redirection
DNS filtering assumes that authorities have control over the domain name servers. The government can remove specific domains from the DNS server, making them “invisible” to anyone using that DNS server, or replace the original domain’s address with another one.
When you type in the Speedify website’s address, the browser returns nothing, or redirects you to a website the government chose.
IP address blocking
IP address blocking assumes that authorities control the ISPs. They can blacklist the IP addresses of websites they want to block. When you request a site, surveillance computers check your request against the list of blacklisted IP addresses. If speedify.com is on that list, as in this example, the internet service provider drops the connection and the request fails.
URL filtering
In this case, the URL (Uniform Resource Locator) or web address is scanned by the surveillance computers for specific keywords. If those are found, the connection will be restricted.
So, if your government doesn’t want you to use Facebook, and you’re trying to read the Speedify blog post on Facebook streaming at https://speedify.com/blog/better-streaming/livestream-event-facebook/, then you won’t be able to access it.
Packet filtering
Packet filtering assumes that authorities scan the contents of each network packet sent to and from your computer. With deep packet inspection technologies, they examine packet contents for banned keywords. Communication identified as containing forbidden content can be disrupted by dropping the connection. You may see an error message in your browser that does not say you are being censored.
As in the example above, when you’re trying to access the page about Facebook, you will not succeed.
Censors use other technologies as well; the Townsend Center and Wikipedia describe them in detail.
How to Circumvent Internet Censorship
There are several ways to bypass restrictions on content online. Here are the main ones.
HTTPS
Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS) is basically a secure version of the HTTP protocol (HTTP over TLS), where nobody can see the data you send and receive from the internet, while it moves between your device and the destination server. It protects against man-in-the-middle attacks, eavesdropping and network tampering.
If the website you’re trying to access uses HTTPS, then you have a better chance that it will work and that the contents of your page won’t be filtered or modified. However, the domain name is still left unencrypted, so, if authorities filter that domain name, this won’t work.
DNS over HTTPS (DoH)
This protocol helps get around internet censorship because it can remove government DNS restrictions: the request for a domain name and the IP address that comes back both travel encrypted over HTTPS, so the network cannot read or change them.
In order to use this, you need an application that has built-in DoH implementation (such as a web browser, operating systems, etc.).
The downside of this is that in many cases not all the elements of the connection are encrypted, leaving room for authorities to restrict the traffic.
Encrypted Server Name Indication (ESNI) and Encrypted Client Hello (ECH)
These are both related protocol extensions for TLS; it all started in 2018 with ESNI and continued in 2020 with ECH. What ECH basically does is secure the meta data left unencrypted by HTTPS, including the server name. This makes ECH one of the best protocol choices for circumventing restrictions, to be included by ISPs, apps, developers, etc.
However, ECH is not 100% censorship-proof. For example, the length of the encrypted negotiation between servers may leak enough information for the domain name to be guessed.
Virtual Private Networks (VPN)
Out of several possibilities to bypass restricted internet content, using a virtual private network (VPN) is the easiest way to go at it. All you need to do is use it when you want to access a blocked resource. Naturally, this assumes that the VPN’s server IP addresses aren’t blocked by the authorities. Turkey, for example, blocked Wikipedia for nearly three years; here is how a VPN works in Turkiye.
A VPN encrypts all communication between your computer and a server in the cloud. This way, nobody can monitor or inspect what you’re accessing online. The only thing they will see is you connecting to a specific IP.
When you choose a VPN, make sure it doesn’t slow down your Internet. Speedify, for example, is an app that encrypts your traffic like a VPN and lets you combine all of your internet connections at once right on your computer or mobile device, for faster downloads and uploads and a connection that stays up if one internet connection drops.
Speedify uses encryption to send and receive data through its network of servers, with more than 50 locations on paid plans. Speedify supports internet freedom and has helped users in countries with Internet censorship, such as Myanmar.
If you live in a country with Internet censorship, try Speedify: the free tier gives you 5 GB per month with a free Speedify account.
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