You could go to jail for USING a VPN to access those sites. It also allows the government to "regulate and shut down" any social media site with more than 1 million users. Meaning that all big social media networks would have to do whatever the government wants, since the govenment has a constant threat of banning their network at their fingertips.
I worked for a small ISP and they would not have the hardware to stop people from using DNS over HTTPS to securely resolve domain names and HTTPS to encrypt the data from those resolved servers. Even at scale the hardware this would involve is not economical. I have a quote that I like to use in these situations "The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it" ~John Gilmore
DNS over HTTPS still has to go to a DNS server. If cloudflare, google, all the other big names plus ISP DNS servers all are forced to comply and not resolve or blackhole certain domains what are you going to do? Set your DNS to be in some third country with terrible response times and delayed page loads for all browsing as a result? Query the root DNS servers with your own home-rolled DNS (gee I wonder who controls them if they really went all out, hmm and they don't support any kind of encryption anyways)? I guess you could but it's a pain and most people won't because of cost, skill, and/or experience degradation.
I guess you could use tor and certain other censorship resistant alternative networks but how many people are going to use those? Not that many. Makes it easier to zero in on and conduct targeted attacks, identification, de-anonymization, etc if you want to of those who remain.
Secondly, small ISPs do not transit anywhere meaningful for this ban. If tiktok is banned it's not like your Podunk small town ISP is peering directly with them or for that matter communistforums dot org or chinadaily dot cn or russia today or whatever. They have to go through a tier 1 carrier. I don't care if your small town ISP can't afford such equipment because the big ones can. And they're the ones who matter. They're the ones who connect to off-shore routes and international landings and yes CDNs. They're the ones all roads must go through. They, the big CDNs like Amazon, Cloudflare, Akamai. They're the gatekeepers.
And anyways at this point you're breaking the law. Technical evasion is almost a side discussion regarding the actual issue. If you're any kind of person critical of empire they're already zeroed in on you, they just have to catch you and believe me they know when you're using these censorship resistant networks. They may not know what you're doing with them but the second you slip a little you risk your ass being hauled into court. Maybe you're willing to take that risk. Most people are not and that's the goal. They don't need to stop the 1 in one million die-hard communists from accessing foreign media, they just need to stop you from being able to link it to dem-socs to radicalize them or to debunk lies of the war-mongering bourgeois media and their narratives. So sure, you can be that weird person who knows the truth but can't speak it without admitting to a crime and that's the goal. And your technological solutions do not solve a legal and political problem. Because you and a hundred thousand other people in the country knowing about a falsity is useless if you can only repeat it back to other people already guilty of the same crime. They don't care about converting existing communists or anti-imperialists. They won't care about stopping you from reading this stuff. They just care about stopping us from spreading the message and the truth. That's what this is, a delaying strategy to buy time as empire implodes.
Liberal pablum and idealist nonsense. Acting as if the internet is independent of the base and superstructure, independent of the entities that run it, profit off it, and regulate it. Independent of the violence of state (and independent of the US state's particularly strong role, often hidden at every step of the way). What is all the state department narrative control and propaganda bots on social media but a form of censorship? You can't route around that except by avoiding the places people are. Much in the same way you can 'route around' rental costs for apartments by living in a fridge box in the woods this isn't a solution anyone would consider ideal as you're just checking out and giving up. That culture died anyways, the idealized noble techno-anarchist hacker of the 90s has ceded to the white-collared reactionary tech worker of the 2010s and 2020s. They make their money invading people's privacy ever more for private evil corporations and enjoy "shopping ethically" at upscale stores as their form of "activism". Straight up recuperation at work and more proof unprincipled idealism gets you nowhere.
China's great firewall works. And you better bet your ass I support it. It was never intended to stop everyone and it doesn't, but it stops most, herds people back to stuff safe from western manipulation and propaganda and those who venture beyond tend to be a little savvier. And that's what THIS bill is meant to do. This bill is not about controlling every last person, it's about keeping enough of the opinion on their side and not allowing any significant percent of people to know the truth or anything but one of their various lies. In China you don't get sent to prison for reposting RFA lies by itself. You get in trouble if too many people hear it and/or it causes problems as a result. But with this bill you wouldn't get in trouble just if too many (a hundred say) Americans interact with your reposting of "enemy" media, you'd get in trouble for accessing it period, even in private in your room without telling a single person if technology can finger you. Straight to jail, big fines.
And that's the issue. How do we continue to evangelize against imperialist propaganda when by doing so we risk admitting to committing a crime and/or inciting others to do the same? Your magical technology isn't going to solve that. Most people don't give a fuck about privacy. I mean I'd say at least 20% of US tiktok users legitimately think it's a spying app for the Communist Party of China and their military and they still use it with a shrug despite how readily they can be prompted about how evil and dangerous China is because they don't give a fuck about privacy or anything that involves effort beyond reaching for that which is in front of them within grasp. And the thing is they could have fixed that with a much less heavy-handed approach, several ways. That they're going for this I think shows more panic, more of that liberal mask falling off.
I really don't think you grasp the scalability problem here at all. I say that as a network engineer, but I don't think we are going to convince each other of anything really. To you its already a lost cause, and I just praying you are wrong in the end I guess.
I think you think this is going to take more resources than it in fact does. I doubt the US will have as complete or perfect and implementation as China but it will be enough.
I mean China did this. China did this >15 years ago with 15 year old technology. Technologically. The US has the ability to not only do that but to force companies to figure out ways to best do it at the threat of fines and certainly to threaten people into compliance with the threat of jail-time. The US still controls the western financial system and can inflict punishment if not an end to private entities they wish to bring low for not obeying their edicts. And they have experience. Sanctions are a perfected, preferred weapon of the US and they have hundreds of people who specialize in targeting companies and individuals as well as nations to bring about their surrender and acquiescence to US terms. You've not really addressed the legal regime issues at all. Just offered technical half-solutions and sewn doubt.
You seem like the kind of person who if called in in the 2000s and told we want to stop proliferation of child sexual abuse imagery online would have started ranting how impossible the net is to control and yet many efforts later pedophiles (who aren't among the protected capitalist elite anyways) are more hunted than ever, such material is forced to hide ever deeper away from normal people, etc. Another example. Uh in the 2000s the Bush admin decided to target extreme pornography, among other things bestiality porn. They went to the payment processors, the banks, etc and they had them agree they wouldn't allow anyone who allowed anyone who produced or hosted such content to do business or use their systems. To give you an idea of how pervasive it was, I know someone who as a child in the mid 2000s stumbled on such pornography (the animal stuff) without meaning to or looking for porn at all.
By your quote's logic and by extension your thinking, this shouldn't be, the censorship should have been routed around. (Now let's be clear here, this censorship is good but judging by how pervasive it was, clearly a lot of people would rather it not succeed and yet it has). Don't try and hide behind oh but that's different, no it's not. If anything it's harder to get rid of because that type of stuff stuff that anyone can host anywhere. We're just talking about shutting down one little social media company and access to maybe a few dozen if that foreign news services (to start at least). Orders of magnitude easier.
You think that gives you credibility but it doesn't. Maybe you can try and intimidate non-technical people not in industry but not me. You haven't addressed my points just tried to pull this authority argument and hand-waved it as infeasible. Also, I've known too many network engineers to think them the final say on what can and cannot be done. Let's just say I know for a fact a lot of them would have laughed in the late 2000s if you suggested the idea of the NSA scraping all foreign bound web-traffic for metadata, infeasible, not practical, not scaleable they would have claimed. Yet room 641A was at that point an operating reality. And they have built that datacenter in the southwest for not only doing that but storing it long-term. Again many would laugh and call that infeasible. Not the US government.
You're clearly deep in some idealistic thinking here so we're at odds and you're probably right it's pointless to continue this as we're approaching the world wearing different glasses, using different frameworks. However I do want to just leave this reply because I see in you a past me. Someone spouting idealism, ancient proverbs from idealistic weirdos who are living in a world that by their own admissions is a twisted nightmare version of what they'd hoped would come to pass with their technology, with their "freedom of the net". It's been falsified. It continues to be falsified. Social networks in particular, things like discord destroying irc + forums have allowed the centralization and corporatization of the internet. Cloud computing, CDNs, not even owning your own infrastructure has decimated this idea of the net as this multi-colored thing of a million threads from a million people and companies with tens of thousands of 'independent' networks. The free net was murdered in the cradle by US government control of important parts of it from the beginning and it was buried by the Patriot act and now it's been paved over by this centralization.
You're right! Me being a network engineer means nothing when talking about networking. You are obviously smarter than me when it comes to this! BTW before you do another boring reply I am disengaging from this conversation and am telling you to do the same.