>Nonetheless, it seems like an interesting topic: how exactly do Chinese [or more broadly, any] government [make] decisions on what to block, flow through their

>Nonetheless, it seems like an interesting topic: how exactly do Chinese [or more broadly, any] government [make] decisions on what to block, flow through their government system, before getting to the technical level where they actually do the blocking? Indeed, that is an excellent question, applied to any Nation-State that blocks connections for any reason! Now, this brings up a highly interesting question, which looks something like this: How could someone in Nation-State X know exactly what is blocked by a different Nation-State, Nation-State Y -- without physically being there to perform tests on their Internet as if they were a Citizen/National/Resident/Physically Located -- in Nation-State Y? ? There's no easy answer for that question... at least not without going to Nation-State Y and physically testing their Internet... But if I were to guess at a hypothetical way to do it -- if someone had a Google-size cache snapshot of all websites and their contents on the global Internet, then if that someone also had a Google-style multi-threaded multi-computer web spider like the Googlebot -- then if one could somehow get VPN connections to outgoing IP addresses in Nation-State Y, then one could attempt running that, the effect being similar to being physically in Nation-State Y... From that, one could compare ALL of the results of those connection requests and corresponding web pages -- to see what connections and web pages worked and which ones didn't... For the connections and pages which didn't work, those might have been caused by a website being updated, being taken offline, random Internet failure, etc., etc., that is, one couldn't immediately ascribe responsibility to Nation-State Y intentionally blocking the site or connection without additional debugging/fact-finding/triangulation of the root cause... So, that wouldn't solve the problem... but it might be a good starting point... Something like that, if it would exist, if it could exist (Google + a VPN provider in Nation-State Y would have all of the necessary infrastructure, incidentally!) -- would be a good first step in that direction... In fact, a smaller, one-site-at-a-time version of it could be implemented by remote P2P nodes... In fact, here's an even weirder idea(!), now that I think about it -- use Javascript running on remote P2P nodes (with permission of the node owners!) in other countries to test Internet connectivity to Web Sites (or more broadly, any kind of Internet connectivity, since the Internet is not only the web!): In other words, use something like the following (in conjunction with custom JavaScript code which would test websites/Internet connectivity): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39373960 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39373960 https://pears.com/news/holepunch-unveils-groundbreaking-open-source-peer-to-peer-app-development-platform-pear-runtime/ https://pears.com/news/holepunch-unveils-groundbreaking-open... Anyway, some excellent questions! Thank you for them! You made me think!