Free VPNs don't cost money. And times have changed: there are some reputable free VPNs, like ProtonVPN and Cloudflare's WARP.
Monomate
joined 1 year ago
ISPs shall block, X users shall use VPN to circumvent.
No minimally serious country destroys the legal separation between different companies so brazenly. If it is for such a thing to happen, it's only on exceptional circunstances, and only after the a full lawsuit concludes its natural course, giving all affected parties the right to offer their defenses. Anything far from these basic civilizational principles is no more than a whim from a dictator's inflated ego.
There are legal ways for the judicial system to recover assets. Going after other companies, even if Musk has 40% stake on Starlink, is madness. One thing does not justify the other.
Fighting crime is desirable, but within the limits of the law:
Brazilian Internet Civil Rights Framework
Art. 19. In order to ensure freedom of expression and prevent censorship, the internet application provider may only be held civilly liable for damages resulting from content generated by third parties if, after a specific court order, it fails to take steps to, within the scope and technical limits of its service and within the specified timeframe, make the content identified as infringing unavailable, except for legal provisions to the contrary.
§ 1º The court order referred to in the caput must contain, under penalty of nullity, clear and specific identification of the content identified as infringing, which allows the unequivocal location of the material.
Note that the legislator took the trouble to say right at the beginning that the intention is to prevent censorship. Few laws are written in such detail as to reinforce their guiding principles in the middle of the provisions. If the legislator went to this trouble, it is because the intention of avoiding censorship is fundamental to this law. If judges are ignoring the law, they're ignoring the will of the people.
Here in Brazil we have a judge that concentrates the powers of: judge, prosecutor, victim, legislator, chief of Federal Police. And he wasn't elected by the people. Are we still really a democracy? Are we so different from countries like Russia?
The Brazilian Internet Law (Marco Civil da Internet) says that the content to be removed via judicial intervention must be specified. It does not allow the blocking of entire accounts from a social media platform. In fact, Brazilian Constitution forbids this kind of censorship (Censura Prévia). The decision to block X nationwide is based on a series of decisions that blatantly violate Brazilian Law.
By the way, the dictator-judge Alexandre de Moraes ordered Starlink's asset freeze before Starlink wouldn't comply with X blocking.
If the solution is as simple as downloading a VPN app from the smartphone app store and clicking "activate VPN," I wouldn't consider it tech-savvy territory. In the past, VPNs were indeed esoteric tech for nerds, but nowadays they're commoditized stuff. And if Brazil's regime keeps getting more repressive under the dictator, with the blocking of more social media sites, more people will have the opportunity/necessity to learn about VPNs.