Collateral Freedom

Collateral freedom is an anti-censorship strategy that attempts to make it economically prohibitive for censors to block a resource. The diverse needs of businesses to exchange information across international borders makes it impossible to build a catalogue of "good" and "bad" networks or websites. A censor requires some confidence when they block a resource that it won't be affecting economic activity. It’s difficult to achieve accuracy with filtering as most internet traffic is encrypted and must be categorised at speed to make blocking decisions. As a result, censors will usually err on the side of under-blocking.

One way to exploit this is by deploying solutions in large platforms that are “too big to block”, like public cloud providers. Public cloud providers host large numbers of clients in shared infrastructure to benefit from economies of scale, but this sharing also makes it difficult to know what content is being accessed. Similarly, large social networks host content from large numbers of publishers but all traffic between the user and the social network is typically encrypted and so the censor cannot know what is being read. Blocking the cloud provider would have a negative impact on businesses and would hurt state revenue, and blocking the social media platform would cause backlash from the people: neither is an attractive option for the censor.

Another approach is to use constantly rotating identifiers, as even where a resource may be easy to block once identified, a new resource can be deployed quickly to replace it rendering the blocks ineffective. Due to erring on the side of under-blocking, attempts to access previously unseen content usually succeed. Even with a procedure for screening or approval, blocking by default would bog down innovation and development to the extent that it could cease, certainly falling behind other economies. This approach is particularly suited for news media where the majority of readers will be interested in an article for only a short time after it is published, and if it is later blocked by the censor then the effect will be minimal.

With collateral freedom on your side you can have the upper hand when it comes to making your content accessible to your audience.