The ongoing absurdity between Brazil and X (Twitter) made me wonder, can’t Brazil just block X domains? Why is it dependent on X doing it from their end?
In: Engineering
With a few exceptions, such as China, governments don’t run a big firewall controlling all traffic in and out of their country. This would be an extra step, bottle neck, point of failure etc, so it doesn’t typically happen.
What makes more sense is that all the local internet providers have their own traffic peering routes in and out of the country, allowing them to re-route traffic away from links experiencing downtime or congestion.
As a de-centralised solution, you’re less likely to have a single incident take down the whole country’s internet, but it means the government doesn’t have a single point they can apply restrictions too.
So, rather than using technology, they use policy. Internet Service Providers are companies operating in your country, needing to confirm to your rules and laws. It is not unreasonable for a country to expect companies to pay their taxes, build their data centres to building code, or follow requirements to block forbidden websites.
Where Musk thinks it’s different is that Starlink is using satellites not fibre cables buried in the ground, so its almost like he doesn’t understand that these blocks are imposed at the ISP level, not in a giant firewall around the country level. Almost like he doesn’t understand how technology works.
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