I'm guessing you haven't spent much time looking into how oppressive regimes work.
They aren't going "to realize that they are being an oppressive regime" and have an epiphany where they realize, "Hey maybe I'm an evil dictator?"
If you are up for reading, I highly recommend Michael Malice's book, Dear Reader: The Unauthorized Autobiography of Kim Jong Il . After reading that you will completely understand why "see how long it is until they protest or move" is a silly thing to say.
We don't need oppressive regimes to "realize" they're oppressive. We simply need to shift the incentives by making it financially expensive to censor. This is known as "collateral freedom"[1], and has been used to publish censored content in China.
This is a bloodless equivalent of using human shields or hiding your forces in a hospital - you involve lots of innocent civilians in hope that the government will not be willing to absorb the sacrifice.
> We simply need to shift the incentives by making it financially expensive to censor. This is known as "collateral freedom"
In this context, "making it financially expensive" means "banning us would also mean banning lots of other unrelated services, which will have negative impact on both economy and morale of the population".
In the same way, in warfare, using civilians as human shields is "shifting incentives", making it PR-expensive to strike you down.
In both cases, an authoritarian government may be willing to eat the loss and deal with you anyway. And in both cases, you're the one putting innocent people in harm's way.
In your strategy you only have three choices - put your own label, put someone else's label, or just give up. The labels are necessary for routing. If you put someone else's label on your packets, you're turning them into a potential target.
They might not have reasonable freedom to move or protest, but people will always have the radical freedom to oppose an oppressive regime. It is just much more costly and requires the knowledge that you live in an oppressive regime and access to information in order to break it.
I'd be happy to give a very brief TL;DR with the disclaimer that I recommend either the book for a full picture or the Michael Malice interview on Joe Rogan's podcast (WARNING: NSFW language) [1]
There are a few factors involved (and please bear in mind I'm leaving out a lot of detail here, and this is nowhere near a comprehensive list).
1. There is extensive "brainwashing" regarding the great leader. He is praised for everything. There's a famous story about a western optometrist that performs surgery routine every where else in the world, but rare in N Korea that restores eye sight. The first thing people often do after receiving their sight is not thank the doctor, but to praise a poster of the great leader, thanking him for restoring their sight (I think this was a Nat Geo thing but I don't remember exactly).
2. There is a culture of tattling that heavily incentivizes ratting out your friends and family to the authorities. You will be punished for even having unclean thoughts, let alone taking bad actions. The pervasiveness of this makes it such that people often self-report themselves for thought crimes due to feelings of guilt or concern over getting turned in by friends/family (you may do less time in the prison camp for self-reporting).
3. Families are harshly punished for actions taken by their family members. This means that if you escape, your family will be likely killed or sent to prison camp. If you die in camp, your son/daughter/father/mother will have to take your place to finish your sentence. Thus even suicide/death in prison camp is a betrayal of your family. There is no way out.
There is a difference when people have never had access to things and when you take away access.
A difference would be like America and North Korea and taking away the internet. The vast majority of Americans use the internet and it is an integral part to their lives. You take it away and they would riot in a heartbeat. On the other hand if you have a regime where the majority of people never had access to the internet (or any whatever), taking it away does not cause a riot. The small groups of people that had access won't have the critical mass needed to cause such a riot.
The point is not to make a dictator to realize "Hey, maybe I'm the baddie" but "If I take this away then someone will stage a coup." Dictatorships tend not to be very stable regimes. It is hard to balance the line of power and being overthrown.
TLDR: People care much more when you remove something that is already integral to their life. Not so much if it isn't.
> You take it away and they would riot in a heartbeat.
I'm not certain that this is true.
No American Dictator would just outright ban the internet, no they'd say they were protecting children and blocking terrorists, and require internet providers to block that content.
Anyone arguing that this is censorship would be branded as a supporter of child pornography and terrorists.
A few more steps along that line and what you have is no longer the internet as we know it, but PatriotNet(tm) (insert waving flag, anthem, etc).
Do it enough subtle steps and they'd get away with it without anything more than a few grumpy "libtards" complaining on TV.
You're right in that it can be done through a long process. But as freedomben notes (in response to my reply), Egypt is an example of what I'm talking about.
Amazon isn't in the business of forcing oppressive regimes to realize they are oppressive regimes, they are in the business of selling goods and services regardless of the oppressiveness of the regime governing the region where the currency comes from.
If you want Amazon to stop doing business with oppressive regimes, contact your politicians about sanctions.
The problem is deeper than that; even if Amazon doesn't sell stuff to oppressive regimes, they host the sites/services of companies who do.
And if the solution was to force Amazon to block any access from their servers to those oppressive regimes, that wouldn't help Signal at all, because they too would be blocked.
You're not wrong, it would certainly not be in shareholder's financial interest for amazon to take this stance.
For the record, U.S. politicians have voted on sanctions on Russia for cyber crimes and brought representatives to the UN raising the issue of their human rights records.
> For the record, U.S. politicians have voted on sanctions on Russia
Indeed, the US nearly destroyed Russia's largest aluminum company - Rusal - recently in a sanctions move against an oligarch close to Putin (Oleg Deripaska, who owns the majority of Rusal).
The best way to deal with oppressive regimes, is generally to go through powerful political bodies/groups, whether the UN, G7, or US Congress. The impact a company like Amazon (or Google, Facebook, etc) can make is very trivial. So trivial as to be meaningless to a typical oppressive regime. Congress, in tandem with large allies, can hammer eg Russia's primitive industrial economy, by comparison, with targeted sanctions on steel, aluminum, whatever.
"On April 23, however, the US government gave Rusal's American customers "more time to comply with sanctions", even saying it would "consider lifting them if United Company Rusal Plc’s major shareholder, Russian tycoon Oleg Deripaska, ceded control of the company." Department of the Treasury gave these clients until October 23, 2018 to comply with (wind down business) the Rusal sanctions."
For the record, Deripaska is no friend of Putin, who forced him to start paying tax and stay out of politics.
Look at how Putin humiliated him several years ago during an industrial dispute, when Putin took the side of workers against Deripaska.
That premise has a very mixed bag of results historically. It works on some regimes, and fails entirely on others.
Cuba defied an aggressive embargo by the US for ~50 years, which is partially responsible for Cubans typically having present incomes of about $20 per month. [1] By contrast, Haiti, which is one of the poorest nations on earth, has a higher median income than Cuba. The Castro brothers were simply unmoved by the extreme financial consequences (and the people of Cuba also did not topple them across more than half a century).
Similarly it didn't work against North Korea across 60 years. Even while the North watched South Korea develop and grow into one of the 20 or so richest nations.
It also didn't work very well against the USSR. The West heavily limited its trade and economic cooperation with the USSR across the entire post WW2 era until their collapse. The West rapidly developed advanced technological economies, the USSR did not, their people suffered extraordinary poverty and backwardness. The regimes in Moscow didn't care. What finally brought down the USSR, was the collapse of the price of oil brought on by a strong dollar shock in the late 1980s (by contrast they were doing far better economically in the 1970s and early 1980s as the price of oil was very high).
One of the common characteristics of an oppressive regime is that they already suffer financial consequences for their actions; sanctions, overseas account seizures, trade embargoes.
Hoping that they'll throw their hands in the air and give-up instead of blocking AWS etc is naive. The people making the decision don't suffer the consequences as do their subjects.
Sure, but the point being is that Amazon is not consenting to being a bargaining chip in this manner. If you're in control of a site, and you want to say, "If you block them, my site will be blocked too, in solidarity," that's just fine. But it would be pretty awful for you to involve me in that, as well, if I don't wish to be part of it.
Right, and them taking that stand isn't what most of their customers want from them. "We don't want to make political points in other countries, we're just here to sell ads" is the generic corporate position.
China is huge compared to those other oppressive regimes out there.
Also, AFAIK, China hasn't been able to recreate GitHub. Since GitHub is HTTPS-only and China needs it enough to not block it, a lot of censorship circumvention tools are available in China through GitHub.
Want to censor the internet, fine, send your citizens back to the dark ages; see how long it is until they protest or move.