[johncolanduoni]

Okay, but now you’re running a country-scale VPN service in Russia or whatever, and somebody has to pay for it. Or you have to acquire a botnet, again to handle the internet of a whole country. These are non-trivial barriers to overcome, and simply having transit to Russia does not solve them.

[tucnak]

You know they can run NAT at the border right? Iran -> Russia -> the rest of the Internet. Russians would never re-advertise Iranian routes, and because they're all such good pals they could let them use whatever segment, so all Iranian traffic would simply appear as Russian traffic to the rest of the Internet, using normal residential subnets of which there are plenty. No need to ever involve the commercial VPN providers, and the scale would be negligible considering we're only talking about "the elites" of which there aren't many.

This is not as hard as you think.

[vlovich123]

But also Wireguard VPNs are also trivial to spin up and operate at scale, especially since what’s being discussed here is Internet access just for the elites which is a small fraction of the entire population. But yeah, lots and lots of ways to make this work if you don’t get everyone else to go along with your embargo.