That's what they're aiming for, yes.

They want to know where everyone is and what every person is doing at every possible moment of every day, be that in public or on the Internet. They are paranoid and know that their entire system is in danger of collapse with the common man gaining control over the rich and powerful.

Thus they resort to extreme control of the commoners to ensure that won't happen.

Child protection and anti-pornography stances are perfect excuses because they're very difficult to argue against.

Yup, and that's how the US got the Mafia. We banned alcohol, but people wanted to drink, so the Mafia made that happen.

All a ban does is hurt law abiding citizens and businesses.

Eh, I disagree. Slavery being banned is obviously a good thing, but that's because it's immoral to own someone else, so it's essentially just kidnapping. Gambling, on the other hand, shouldn't be banned for the simple reason that consenting adults should be able to do it if they choose.

Basically, I believe there are two types of rights:

• negative rights - restricts others from preventing individuals from doing things to you (e.g. freedom from slavery, freedom to gamble, etc)
• positive rights - forces others to provide goods or services to you (e.g. free healthcare, right to counsel, etc)

I believe nobody should gamble because it's a poor financial decision and very addictive (and I choose to avoid gambling), but I also believe you should be allowed to gamble, and the government should ensure that companies that provide gambling services do so fairly (i.e. advertisements about win-rates and whatnot are accurate).

So yes, if gambling wasn't allowed, people w/ addictions would be better off, but those who aren't at risk of gambling addiction would be harmed due to restrictions on their freedom. So the question is, do we want government to protect us from ourselves, or merely provide a safety net for when we screw up? I'm absolutely in the latter camp, and I think we should use taxes to fund recovery programs for addictive behaviors in lieu of banning them. In general, I think a tax is way more rights-respecting than a ban.

Gambling between two people or very small groups is mostly ok and something humans have done since cave times.

Now, because real life has profit seeking corporations in control of gambling that know and abuse all psychological tricks available to maximize profits, I don't think allowing them to exist is good for anyone except the owners. Casinos are also perfect for money laundering, so that's another reason to not allow them to function, although with the internet they can just pick and choose a country to exist in.

I agree that gambling is bad and nobody should do it, but that's different from the government preventing you from doing it.

Something being "bad" doesn't mean it should be banned, it means it needs closer scrutiny to make sure both sides of the transaction are fully informed of the risks and can meaningfully consent.

money laundering

I don't like this reasoning because the underlying assumption is that violating people's privacy is okay if it helps catch criminals.

That said, there are typically rules that limit this. In most areas, casinos have to ID you and report any transaction over a certain amount (usually $10k or so per day, many casinos have a lower threshold) to tax authorities specifically to combat money laundering, just like banks do. That seems to limit money laundering for larger players, but obviously doesn't do much for smaller players. To do better, we either need much lower limits, or much higher surveillance, and both would violate innocent people's privacy.

Instead of that, we should take a hard look at policy and policing. For example, a lot of money laundering is by drug dealers, and they exist due to drug bans. Maybe we should consider legalizing and regulating more drugs, which would give people safer options, reduce incarceration rates, and reduce laundering from illegal drugs since more people would go for the safer options. On the policing side, we can improve training, reallocate people from ticketing to investigative work, and build community trust to improve quality of reports.

At the end of the day, I think personal liberty and privacy is more important than preventing harm or catching criminals. I also think we can do both, but we need to start from the perspective of maximising liberty and privacy.

You can't block VPNs without blocking the entire internet. You can block known VPN services, but you can't prevent people from hosting their own.

Some known VPN protocols could be blocked, using introspection tools. However, this would just render corporate VPNs useless. VPN traffic is just bytes, and so is WebSockets. Good luck figuring out whether my HTTPS traffic is legitimate internet traffic, or masked VPN traffic.

Good news, we closed that pesky loophole by banning encryption without backdoors.

If they can't decode it, you better be ready to explain exactly what those bytes were!

Even if they go that route, and frankly I think they would get lynched before we got to that point, they can't monitor every single connection. That just way too much traffic.

That's why China has a firewall, because that's the best option they can come up with because monitoring every Chinese persons data is an impossible task. Their only option would be to go North Korea route, and just close the internet but that would basically end their economy.

In China? I've read that sentence like six times I'm not quite sure what you're alluding to, but China's had fiber for about 10 years now. The reason they allowed it is because increasing everyone's bandwidth doesn't really make the job of monitoring them any harder. It's still the same number of connections. Plus it allows businesses to be competitive on the global market.

Also they kind of assume their firewall would work. Initially it did work, at least for the majority of people, but over time that more and more have learnt to use a VPN and now the whole thing's a bit of a pointless exercise. There is a massive disconnect in China between the younger generation who use VPNs and the older generation who just consume state media.