@sleepyowl@chaos.social @chloetankahhui@mas.to this is an excellent thread

i've had similar thoughts

in the near term any such policy would be incredibly leaky and mostly ineffective

but they have almost all the pieces in place to make this quite difficult to bypass in 5-10 years

first is requiring secure boot+tpm to only load blessed operating systems. windows 11 and maybe a quisling version of linux (focusing on pc here, but the same will apply to macs and mobile devices which are already further along)

next mainstream sites will start requiring hardware attestation to access them. they'll simply refuse to load or only allow very limited versions unless secure boot + tpm is present and it's running a blessed operating system. alternatively this could be applied at the ISP level and accessing anything would fail without hardware attestation

sites not requiring attestation would still exist, but most people only use a handful of already highly restrictive sites like facebook, instagram, youtube, etc. but they could also ban unrestricted sites if they wanted to

workarounds will likely exist for a long time as long as they choose to allow legacy and simple embedded devices to access the internet, but they can choose to restrict those at any time. it'll get increasingly difficult to access uncensored information, especially as more and more countries develop similar regimes and it becomes difficult to even find a VPN endpoint that isn't restrictive

this is why we need to stop age/identity verification before it can take hold