: 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.
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