Censorship Resistance as a Side-Effect

This position paper presents the following thought experiment: can we build communication protocols that (1) are sufficiently useful that they achieve widespread adoption as general-purpose communication mechanisms and (2) thwart censorship as a consequence of their design? We posit that a useful communication platform that is inherently resistant to traffic analysis, if widely adopted and used primarily for purposes not related to censorship circumvention, may be too politically and economically costly for a government to block.