On Modeling the Costs of Censorship
This work addresses the challenge of improving censorship evasion for users in restricted environments, but it appears incremental as it builds on prior evaluation methods.
The paper tackles the problem of evaluating censorship evasion tools by proposing an economic model of censorship costs, which leads to new evaluation criteria and suggestions for evasion strategies.
We argue that the evaluation of censorship evasion tools should depend upon economic models of censorship. We illustrate our position with a simple model of the costs of censorship. We show how this model makes suggestions for how to evade censorship. In particular, from it, we develop evaluation criteria. We examine how our criteria compare to the traditional methods of evaluation employed in prior works.