alt Hacker NewsI don't know that they would, but the government could easily crack down on this and catch a decent amount of people that are seeding without a VPN or similar to shield their IP.
If anyone I know is set on torrenting I tell them to at least use a client that allows uploads to be disabled. Its not foolproof, and isn't great for the torrenting ecosystem, but if the government gets all anti-Napster again it would at least help.
In order to keep the data distributed in a way that maximizes availability, we're going to need routing protocols that tell us things like:
> don't seed this, both of your neighbors already have it, instead seee this which is rare in your region
That same metadata system can handle:
> don't share this with people who you don't trust in domain foo
Where foo indicates a group of people that won't participate in censorship.
It would get switched according to the same logic that ensures that people do end up with data nearby that is relevant to their interests.
Like, if there's only one university in the world that studies a certain kind of bacteria, info about it should travel in that direction and stay nearby (but not too nearby, we don't want a single node failure to wipe out the data). So "keep this away from Putin's goons" could be a routing predicate subject to the same rules, though people would need to exercise some trust hygiene for that, but combined with a bit of steganography I think it's solvable.