I think you think this is going to take more resources than it in fact does. I doubt the US will have as complete or perfect and implementation as China but it will be enough.

I mean China did this. China did this >15 years ago with 15 year old technology. Technologically. The US has the ability to not only do that but to force companies to figure out ways to best do it at the threat of fines and certainly to threaten people into compliance with the threat of jail-time. The US still controls the western financial system and can inflict punishment if not an end to private entities they wish to bring low for not obeying their edicts. And they have experience. Sanctions are a perfected, preferred weapon of the US and they have hundreds of people who specialize in targeting companies and individuals as well as nations to bring about their surrender and acquiescence to US terms. You’ve not really addressed the legal regime issues at all. Just offered technical half-solutions and sewn doubt.

You seem like the kind of person who if called in in the 2000s and told we want to stop proliferation of child sexual abuse imagery online would have started ranting how impossible the net is to control and yet many efforts later pedophiles (who aren’t among the protected capitalist elite anyways) are more hunted than ever, such material is forced to hide ever deeper away from normal people, etc. Another example. Uh in the 2000s the Bush admin decided to target extreme pornography, among other things bestiality porn. They went to the payment processors, the banks, etc and they had them agree they wouldn’t allow anyone who allowed anyone who produced or hosted such content to do business or use their systems. To give you an idea of how pervasive it was, I know someone who as a child in the mid 2000s stumbled on such pornography (the animal stuff) without meaning to or looking for porn at all.

By your quote’s logic and by extension your thinking, this shouldn’t be, the censorship should have been routed around. (Now let’s be clear here, this censorship is good but judging by how pervasive it was, clearly a lot of people would rather it not succeed and yet it has). Don’t try and hide behind oh but that’s different, no it’s not. If anything it’s harder to get rid of because that type of stuff stuff that anyone can host anywhere. We’re just talking about shutting down one little social media company and access to maybe a few dozen if that foreign news services (to start at least). Orders of magnitude easier.

I say that as a network engineer

You think that gives you credibility but it doesn’t. Maybe you can try and intimidate non-technical people not in industry but not me. You haven’t addressed my points just tried to pull this authority argument and hand-waved it as infeasible. Also, I’ve known too many network engineers to think them the final say on what can and cannot be done. Let’s just say I know for a fact a lot of them would have laughed in the late 2000s if you suggested the idea of the NSA scraping all foreign bound web-traffic for metadata, infeasible, not practical, not scaleable they would have claimed. Yet room 641A was at that point an operating reality. And they have built that datacenter in the southwest for not only doing that but storing it long-term. Again many would laugh and call that infeasible. Not the US government.

You’re clearly deep in some idealistic thinking here so we’re at odds and you’re probably right it’s pointless to continue this as we’re approaching the world wearing different glasses, using different frameworks. However I do want to just leave this reply because I see in you a past me. Someone spouting idealism, ancient proverbs from idealistic weirdos who are living in a world that by their own admissions is a twisted nightmare version of what they’d hoped would come to pass with their technology, with their “freedom of the net”. It’s been falsified. It continues to be falsified. Social networks in particular, things like discord destroying irc + forums have allowed the centralization and corporatization of the internet. Cloud computing, CDNs, not even owning your own infrastructure has decimated this idea of the net as this multi-colored thing of a million threads from a million people and companies with tens of thousands of ‘independent’ networks. The free net was murdered in the cradle by US government control of important parts of it from the beginning and it was buried by the Patriot act and now it’s been paved over by this centralization.