Session
Organizer 1: Technical Community, Western European and Others Group (WEOG)
Organizer 2: Private Sector, Latin American and Caribbean Group (GRULAC)
Organizer 2: Private Sector, Latin American and Caribbean Group (GRULAC)
Speaker 1: Mallory Knodel, Technical Community, Western European and Others Group (WEOG)
Speaker 2: Vinicius Fortuna, Private Sector, Latin American and Caribbean Group (GRULAC)
Speaker 3: Jeremy Yen, Civil Society, Western European and Others Group (WEOG)
Speaker 4: Oktavía Hrund Guðrúnar Jóns, Civil Society, Western European and Others Group (WEOG)
Speaker 5: Laura Cunningham, Civil Society, Western European and Others Group (WEOG)
Speaker 2: Vinicius Fortuna, Private Sector, Latin American and Caribbean Group (GRULAC)
Speaker 3: Jeremy Yen, Civil Society, Western European and Others Group (WEOG)
Speaker 4: Oktavía Hrund Guðrúnar Jóns, Civil Society, Western European and Others Group (WEOG)
Speaker 5: Laura Cunningham, Civil Society, Western European and Others Group (WEOG)
Format
Roundtable
Duration (minutes): 60
Format description: The 60-minute roundtable format is ideally suited for this session due to its ability to foster a dynamic and focused conversation among diverse experts from the technical, policy, and civil society sectors, allowing for a rich exchange of perspectives on the evolving landscape of censorship and network resilience; this format encourages collaborative problem-solving on complex policy questions while maximizing engagement with walk-in participants who can contribute their insights, ensuring a lively and impactful discussion within the constraints of a busy IGF schedule and leading to actionable takeaways for all stakeholder groups.
Duration (minutes): 60
Format description: The 60-minute roundtable format is ideally suited for this session due to its ability to foster a dynamic and focused conversation among diverse experts from the technical, policy, and civil society sectors, allowing for a rich exchange of perspectives on the evolving landscape of censorship and network resilience; this format encourages collaborative problem-solving on complex policy questions while maximizing engagement with walk-in participants who can contribute their insights, ensuring a lively and impactful discussion within the constraints of a busy IGF schedule and leading to actionable takeaways for all stakeholder groups.
Policy Question(s)
A. How do new censorship circumvention tools impact legal requirements for content moderation, especially concerning platforms operating globally?
B. What are the jurisdictional challenges when it comes to ensuring cross-border resilience in global networks? How do we balance resilience with respecting local laws?
C. What role should public policy play in proactively fostering the development and deployment of resilient services that can withstand censorship attempts?
What will participants gain from attending this session? Workshop participants will learn about existing tools to circumvent censorship that are made for everyday people. Participants from the policy field will learn about the latest developments in network resilience and how shifts in regulation will better suit a resilient and durable information ecosystem. The technical community and private sector might learn about these new models, frameworks and tools to enhance the resilience of their networks and services. This session will serve as a “state of the art” in internet censorship in 2025 from the vantage point of those providing the “core of the internet” services: VPN providers, network measurement, and global DNS services.
Description:
Keeping people connected across the globe is a continuous effort—whether facing the physical challenges of undersea cable damage or the censorship aimed at suppressing social movements. While traditional circumvention tools like VPNs and proxies continue to provide essential workarounds to “break out” of censored environments, we are witnessing a complementary and increasingly important shift toward building circumvention capabilities directly into services themselves in order to “break through” censorship. This new architecture for censorship circumvention moves beyond traditional VPNs by focusing on a multi-layered strategy that minimizes the need for them. This involves leveraging stronger internet protocols like HTTPS, Encrypted DNS, QUIC, and Encrypted ClientHello to bypass various blocking methods. Furthermore, it embraces decentralization by embedding circumvention capabilities directly into applications, enabling proxyless and partial tunneling techniques, and employing smart strategy selection to adapt to different censorship methods. This approach aims to build resilience against censorship directly into online services. We start our discussion with the state of the art in censorship techniques and end with practical advice on how the technology being designed today can consider censorship and circumvent it with fit-for-purpose techniques that range across the internet’s core elements: naming and numbering, routing, security and physical infrastructure.
Keeping people connected across the globe is a continuous effort—whether facing the physical challenges of undersea cable damage or the censorship aimed at suppressing social movements. While traditional circumvention tools like VPNs and proxies continue to provide essential workarounds to “break out” of censored environments, we are witnessing a complementary and increasingly important shift toward building circumvention capabilities directly into services themselves in order to “break through” censorship. This new architecture for censorship circumvention moves beyond traditional VPNs by focusing on a multi-layered strategy that minimizes the need for them. This involves leveraging stronger internet protocols like HTTPS, Encrypted DNS, QUIC, and Encrypted ClientHello to bypass various blocking methods. Furthermore, it embraces decentralization by embedding circumvention capabilities directly into applications, enabling proxyless and partial tunneling techniques, and employing smart strategy selection to adapt to different censorship methods. This approach aims to build resilience against censorship directly into online services. We start our discussion with the state of the art in censorship techniques and end with practical advice on how the technology being designed today can consider censorship and circumvent it with fit-for-purpose techniques that range across the internet’s core elements: naming and numbering, routing, security and physical infrastructure.
Expected Outcomes
Discussion will feed into an upcoming paper on the subject.
Hybrid Format: We anticipate that speakers will be onsite and online, so we will ensure interaction between onsite and online attendees by requesting all questions throughout the session be submitted through the virtual platform chat function, where we will also maintain the microphone queue. These will be relayed to online and onsite speakers and attendees on a microphone if made in person, through the remote moderator, or directly in the virtual platform. The design of the session will ensure the best possible experience for online and onsite participants as it will build in time for questions and input by participants. We will also set aside the final 20 minutes for questions. We intend to monitor the chat function throughout the session. The onsite and remote moderators will coordinate in a direct channel and they will play an active role by encouraging questions on specific themes and posing questions directly to the panelists.