: How do countries ban websites, and how do VPNs get around it ?
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something I actually cover professionally as a journalist.
Generally a court order to a ISP is put in place (but there’s other methods, like the UK UK outsources a bunch to a private charity run by donors). the ISPs then put blocks on the domains at the DNS level (so looking up the website that way fail, or is redirected to a block page) and it may use Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) to check for packets from that site, and drop it.
VPNs are an encrypted connection to another computer. You might use it if you Work from Home to connect to the work network (and get a virtual desktop system, hosted on a company server). It can also be used as a relay. So you get a VPN to say Sweden, and your system creates an encrypted connection to a VPN computer in Sweden, which you then send all your traffic over. That traffic then enters the internet at that Swedish computer. So your internet connection is effectively not your ISP, but that of the Swedish VPN host. Thus you circumvent blocks on your ISP, by using the endpoint of the VPN as your ISP.
It’s a bit like a secret tunnel that goes under the internet, and comes out somewhere else, and is treated like your normal exit.
The way the Internet works is shockingly similar to the way physical mail works.
Let’s say there were some companies out there that are like old-school Netflix that can send you DVDs in the mail. If you send them money enclosed in a letter, they’ll mail you back with the thing you wanted to buy.
Obviously, to get the message to them that you want to buy their wares, you have to address a letter to their store, and let the postal system carry it there. They use that address to know where to send it. The reverse happens when the store sends the item back to you.
Let’s now say that, for whatever reason, the government in your country wants to ban these stores. It’s illegal to operate one, and it’s illegal to buy from one. What can they do to stop you?
The government can go to the mail carriers to tell them that if they see any letter addressed to or from a known company on the banlist, to intercept and destroy it. You, living within this country, have to rely on your local post carriers to send and receive your mail, and if they are constantly filtering out packages to and from these companies, that effectively locks you out.
You may already be able to scheme a workaround here. What if, instead of sending packages to and from the store directly, you had a friend who lived in another country where it’s *not* illegal to shop at these stores, and you went through them? You send the friend some money and instructions, they forward it to the store, receive the item, and then send it back to you. The government blocking traffic to and from the store won’t detect it as a problem–it’s not illegal to send mail to and from a friend of yours in another country, is it?
Obviously if your friend falls under investigation for too much suspicious activity, the government may add that friend to their blocklist, too. In that situation you’d need to find a different friend.
In this analogy, the postal system is your Internet service provider (ISP), packages are data packets, and that friend in another country is the VPN.
Technically that last one would be considered a *proxy*, not quite a fully-fledged VPN. Proxies are nice, but since they’re singular entities that are designed for this kind of activity, it can be easy to weed them out and block them, just like the friend who was investigated and blocked.
A true VPN are many, many proxies scattered around the world that let a paying customer connect to any one they need at any given moment. Since you can be using any of hundreds of middlemen at any given time, it makes traffic difficult to trace back to you, and it makes any one of them a little more difficult to pick out as a proxy. VPNs essentially protect your identity the same way disappearing into a crowd of people does.
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