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Let me see if I have it right: currently any domain name owner can go to his TLD and get numerous IP addresses, a number sequence that works the same as his domain name.

So we punch in ‘39643’ [in the web address box] and go to china_dissident.com for example.

It's not quite that easy and not free. If I were going to run the web servers for some Chinese dissidents I would get a $5 / month virtual server at digital ocean, plus backups at other hosting sites. Those usually come with one "free" IPV4 address (you are paying $5 / month for disk space and bandwidth). The lowest tier server at $5 / month would have more than enough bandwidth and storage for the content. Then I would get that IPV4 address into the hands of the dissidents through some other channel.

There is also a free option provided I have a routable IPV6 address. In that case I could route the dissidents to a server at work with an IPV6 address. Wouldn't cost me anything. Some people can do that with their home service providers.

But there is a catch with both of those solutions, IPV4 or IPV6. We would probably quickly end up on a Chinese government blacklist of addresses. The Chinese government may disallow routing to IPV6 somehow (I have no idea) preferring to stay on IPV4 because it's easier for them to track and control. To counter the blacklisting I would have to not only obtain new addresses all the time (clunky at best) but get those addresses into the hands of the dissidents.

The solution for all of those problems is TOR. But TOR brings its own problem which is that it is full of illicit or illegal content and just plain old crap. The Chinese government is not stupid so they will create TOR sites and fill them with bait that might catch dissidents. There's no authentication with such sites, at least no central authentication. Here's a description of what one guy found within China: https://krypt3ia.wordpress.com/2015/06/17/the-chinese-darknet/ It gives you a flavor although it doesn't describe TOR itself.

If I ran a TOR relay on my $5 virtual server it would quickly max out my allocated bandwidth (and probably storage). I would have to configure it to greatly throttle it. Since I can't really know what is passing through I can't just throttle the crap and illegal stuff. Also I don't know enough about it to do that, not to mention I would get pinged with guilt by association and potentially tossed by my provider.

I guess I could also run a normal web server and try to get dissidents to access it via TOR thus circumventing the Great Firewall of China which banned by IP addresses. But I would have to figure out how to get that address out to the dissidents without interference by the Chinese govt within TOR. I definitely do not know how much they interfere or how, but I can't believe they do not do that.

All that said, the internet will gradually evolve to incorporate easy-to-use anonymity and encryption. Bitcoin is a good example. It doesn't have enough bandwidth to get much content to the dissidents but it could at least send tweets or short addresses (either as domain names or IP addresses) to dissidents who know that they are there and know how to decrypt them. I have a lot of experience with that particular tech so i could definitely vouch that it is doable with the caveats that you have to pay for every message via a bitcoin transaction and you have a limit of maybe 20-40 bytes of data per message.