Draft: draft-hall-censorship-tech-latest

Commentary: s / prevention / interference/ ... Censors can degrade performance to a particular site , or for a particular service , effectively making performance so bad for a site that users opt to use a different site or service . China is known to do this . Censors can try to have content removed via takedown requests , under the guise of laws that forbid certain content ( e.g. , hate speech or whatnot ) . The ANC is .za has been accused of using the laws in this fashion . 
   also noted in feedback to me that throttling should get more of a call out than it currently does :
This document describes the technical mechanisms used by censorship
regimes around the world to block or impair Internet traffic (see
RFC7754 for a discussion of Internet blocking and filtering in terms
of Internet architecture).  To that end, we describe three elements
of Internet censorship: prescription, identification, and
interference.  Prescription is the process by which censors determine
what types of material they should block, i.e. they decide to block a
list of pornographic websites.  Identification is the process by
which censors classify specific traffic to be blocked or impaird,
i.e. the censor blocks or impairs all webpages containing "sex" in
the title or traffic to sex.com.  Interference is the process by
which the censor intercedes in communication and prevents access to
censored materials by blocking access or impairing the connection.
This document describes the technical mechanisms used by censorship
regimes around the world to block or impair Internet traffic (see
RFC7754 for a discussion of Internet blocking and filtering in terms
of Internet architecture).  To that end, we describe three elements
of Internet censorship: prescription, identification, and
interference.  Prescription is the process by which censors determine
what types of material they should block, i.e. they decide to block a
list of pornographic websites.  Identification is the process by
which censors classify specific traffic to be blocked or impaired,
i.e. the censor blocks or impairs all webpages containing "sex" in
the title or traffic to sex.com.  Interference is the process by
which the censor intercedes in communication and prevents access to
censored materials by blocking access or impairing the connection.
While other interference techniques outlined in this section mostly
focus on blocking or preventing access to content, it can be an
effective censorship strategy in some cases to not entirely block
access to a given destination, or service but instead degrade the
performance of the relevant network connection.  The resulting user
experience for a site or service under performance degradation can be
so bad that users opt to use a different site, service, or method of
communication, or may not engage in communication at all if there are
no alternatives.  Traffic shaping techniques that rate-limit the
bandwidth available to certain types of traffic is one example of a
performance degradation.
Trade offs: While implementing a performance degradation will not
always eliminate the ability of people to access a desire resource,
it may force them to use other means of communication where
censorship (or surveillance) is more easily accomplished.
Empirical examples: Iran is known to shape the bandwidth available to
HTTPS traffic to encourage unencrypted HTTP traffic Aryan-2012.
In some countries, legal mechanisms exist where an individual can
issue a legal request to a content host that requires the host to
take down content.  Examples include the voluntary systems employed
by companies like Google to comply with "Right to be Forgotten"
policies in the European Union Google-RTBF and the copyright-oriented
notice and takedown regime of the United States Digital Millennium
Copyright Act (DMCA) Section 512 DMLP-512.