The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.
— John Gilmore, founding member Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF)
In its original form, it meant that the Usenet software (which moves messages around in discussion newsgroups) was resistant to censorship because, if a node drops certain messages because it doesn’t like their subject, the messages find their way past that node anyway by some other route. This is also a reference to the packet-routing protocols that the Internet uses to direct packets around any broken wires or fiber connections or routers. (They don’t redirect around selective censorship, but they do recover if an entire node is shut down to censor it.)
— also Gilmore
Gilmore also stated that the denotation of the saying has broadened over time:
The meaning of the phrase has grown through the years. Internet users have proven it time after time, by personally and publicly replicating information that is threatened with destruction or censorship. If you now consider the Net to be not only the wires and machines, but the people and their social structures who use the machines, it is more true than ever.
I am generally bearish on the future of Internet censorship. The Internet helps facilitate some things that one might not like, extensive profiling. But it also is very good at distributing information, and I think that in general, the availability of information in the future will be greater than in the past. I do not think it likely that our future will, on the balance, be more-censorious than our past.
Also, relevant:
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2021/07/12/censor/
— John Gilmore, founding member Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF)
— also Gilmore
I am generally bearish on the future of Internet censorship. The Internet helps facilitate some things that one might not like, extensive profiling. But it also is very good at distributing information, and I think that in general, the availability of information in the future will be greater than in the past. I do not think it likely that our future will, on the balance, be more-censorious than our past.