Aborted Wikipedia ban in Russia and GitHub ban in China show how HTTPS encryption can limit censorship as governments are reluctant to block the entire sites
Parker Higgins / Electronic Frontier Foundation :
Context & Ripple Effects
Parker Higgins at the Electronic Frontier Foundation is pointing to two near-simultaneous episodes as evidence of a structural friction in state censorship: Russia backed off a planned ban on Wikipedia, and China banned GitHub outright rather than surgically — both cases turning on governments' reluctance to block an entire site when encryption hides which pages are objectionable. The mechanism was confirmed later by research showing that after switching exclusively to HTTPS, Wikipedia saw fewer instances of government censorship.
The follow-on coverage sharpens why this matters: Russia responded not by winning the blocking game but by building around it, launching the Kremlin-compliant rival Ruwiki after Wikimedia Russia shut down, while China's censors have moved up the stack, targeting TLS-based circumvention tools ahead of sensitive political moments.
First-order effects
- Russian authorities drop the Wikipedia ban because HTTPS makes selective page-blocking unreliable, leaving full-site blocking — with its visible political cost — as the only technical option.
- GitHub users in China lose direct access entirely, the collateral damage of a government choosing a blunt domain-level block over page-level filtering it can no longer perform.
Second-order effects
- Russia channels demand into domestic substitutes: Ruwiki goes live under an ex-Wikimedia Russia director as the compliant alternative once Wikimedia Russia winds down, shifting the contest from access control to content control.
- China's censors escalate beyond site-blocking to attack the encrypted-connection layer itself, degrading TLS-based circumvention tools that depend on the same indistinguishability HTTPS gives legitimate traffic.
Third-order effects
- If encryption keeps raising the cost of targeted censorship, states split between tolerating collateral over-blocking — measurable in studies like the one finding users in Henan denied access to 5x more websites than typical Chinese users — and building parallel national platforms like Ruwiki.
- The longer pattern points to censorship migrating from network filtering toward content replacement and protocol-level interference, making national alternatives and tooling crackdowns the primary levers rather than domain bans.
The trend: As ubiquitous HTTPS erodes governments' ability to censor individual pages, state censorship is shifting from blocking foreign sites to building compliant national replacements and attacking encrypted protocols themselves.