# Why is the Internet difficult to regulate from a technical standpoint?

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-the-internet-difficult-to-regulate-from-a-technical-standpoint/541731>\
**Category:** Factual Questions\
**Created:** [June 3, 2010, 3:44am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-the-internet-difficult-to-regulate-from-a-technical-standpoint/541731 "2010-06-03T03:44:03Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 2

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Triskadecamus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/b19c9b/32.png) [@Triskadecamus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Triskadecamus)\
**Post date:** [June 4, 2010, 5:27am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-the-internet-difficult-to-regulate-from-a-technical-standpoint/541731/21 "2010-06-04T05:27:02Z")

</div>

The internet perceives censorship as damage to the network, and routes around it. If you become perfectly efficient at censoring connections, you isolate yourself.

Tris

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Gary\_Robson](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/gary_robson/32/3448_2.png) [@Gary\_Robson](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Gary_Robson)\
**Post date:** [June 5, 2010, 6:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-the-internet-difficult-to-regulate-from-a-technical-standpoint/541731/22 "2010-06-05T18:50:32Z")

</div>

> [@Rigamarole](#):
>
> Thanks for the explanation - so is this essentially the case in China? Because as I understand it that’s exactly what they do. They (at least try to) contain all traffic to going through just a few access points. In a country of a billion people that must be unbearably slow.

Remember that it’s not only the _users_ of the Internet that are geographically distributed. The _servers_ are, too.

The Chinese are quite capable of using their laws to censor the contents of Chinese servers–if the penalty for hosting forbidden data is severe enough, nobody wants to do it. The censoring of incoming “foreign” data (where they can’t threaten the hosts with jail terms) is technically feasible if they cut it by source rather than content.

To explain that last sentence, trying to analyze the content of every packet (or set of packets) coming into the country would be an exercise in futility. It would slow things to a crawl and people would circumvent it using encryption or encoding techniques.

On the other hand, saying “we won’t accept any data from [xyz.com](http://xyz.com) (or, more accurately, from the IP address that maps to [xyz.com](http://xyz.com))” is easy. It’s just an entry in a table in the existing routing equipment that uses negligible resources. This technique, known as “blacklisting,” is one of the handy weapons in our ongoing battle against spam.

[Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-the-internet-difficult-to-regulate-from-a-technical-standpoint/541731.md?page=1)