Iran's national policy forces all domestic ASes to route through a single national telecom AS (AS 12880), resulting in Iran connecting to only 6 international networks. By contrast, Singapore has 257 domestic ASes connected to 3,022 international ASes despite similar geographic scale.

Domestic mesh traceroutes (both source and destination inside the target country) uncovered 5,562 new AS edges not present in standard BGP table–derived topology datasets, far exceeding the 647 new edges found by inside-out/outside-in traceroutes using up to 25 probes. Russia, the US, France, the UK, and Ukraine gained the most new edges.

§2.2, Table 1 evaluation

A decision tree with linear regression at leaves (DTLR) trained on AS-topology features for 168 countries predicts Freedom House freedom category (Free/Partly Free/Not Free) with 95% accuracy. Average FPI prediction error was 3.47%, and prediction error remained ≤8 points (on a 0–100 scale) 90% of the time under leave-one-out cross-validation.

§3.3 evaluation

IP density (number of IP addresses per person) is the single most predictive feature of a country's Freedom of Press Index. A normalized IP density value of ≥0.167 reliably predicts high freedom of expression, while normalized maximum BGP policy-compliant path length ≥0.643 reliably predicts low freedom.

§4, Figure 2 evaluation

Singapore's AS topology — 257 domestic ASes with 3,022 international connections — resembles that of high-freedom countries, yet its Freedom of Press Index is 33 (Partly Free), making it a structural outlier where rich international BGP connectivity coexists with enforced information controls. Our DTLR model predicts Singapore's FPI should be ≥70 (Free).

§5 evaluation

Brussee measures a systematic pattern of Chinese government websites actively blocking access from outside China (the "reverse Great Firewall"), publishing a CSV dataset of affected domains (available at zenodo.org/records/18172145). The paper frames this outbound geo-blocking as a cybersecurity-motivated practice — Chinese authorities classify foreign access to domestic government infrastructure as an attack surface — distinct from the inbound information control goal of the GFW.

2026-brussee-reverse-great-firewall §3, §5 ip-blockingasn-blackholing

Brussee develops a conceptual framework distinguishing two logics of government geo-blocking: (1) information control (blocking inbound foreign content from domestic users) and (2) data sovereignty / attack-surface reduction (blocking outbound access by foreign actors to domestic systems). Chinese government site blocking of external IPs is motivated primarily by the second logic, creating an asymmetric internet topology where CN citizens cannot reach the outside world, and outside actors cannot probe CN government infrastructure.

2026-brussee-reverse-great-firewall §2, §4 ip-blockingasn-blackholing

The April 2026 enforcement wave against Chinese VPN resellers operates primarily through administrative "reporting + line-cutting" (通报+拔线) mechanisms enforced via Ministry of Industry and Information Technology bulletins, not packet-level DPI changes. Operators report that newly acquired upstream resources are reported and cut with recovery periods described as "uncontrollable," and that upstream providers typically do not refund resellers after enforcement actions.

2026-ermao-april-airport-outage §一句话结论 / §这轮波动到底发生了什么 ip-blockingasn-blackholing

The dominant enforcement mechanism in April 2026 was administrative 'reporting + line-cutting' (通报 + 拔线) backed by MIIT bulletins, not protocol-level DPI changes. Operators reported that newly acquired upstream resources were reported to authorities quickly after acquisition, recovery timelines were uncontrollable, and some upstream providers refused refunds after enforcement actions, producing sustained capacity contraction across the shared VPN-reseller ecosystem.

2026-ermao-april-airport-outage §这轮波动到底发生了什么 ip-blockingasn-blackholing

The April 2026 enforcement cycle created a resource-scarcity feedback loop: upstream providers cut lines with no obligation to refund resellers, newly acquired replacement resources can themselves be reported and cut within days, and stable-resource availability windows are described as "越来越短" (increasingly short) while costs rise concurrently. The overall effect is systemic capacity contraction forecast to continue through at least May 2026.

2026-ermao-april-airport-outage §这轮波动到底发生了什么 / §四月后的趋势判断 ip-blockingasn-blackholingthrottling

Shared domestic-entry transit architectures (国内入口 + 海外转发) suffered disproportionate impact because all nodes sharing a single domestic entry point went down simultaneously when that entry was reported and cut. Operators described configurations degrading from 'three-line redundancy to single entry,' eliminating failover capacity under enforcement pressure.

2026-ermao-april-airport-outage §为什么中转机场这次受冲击更明显 ip-blockingasn-blackholing