The single most practical question about internet censorship is “can I get around it?” — and the answer is overwhelmingly decided in two countries. Rank every country by how many distinct anti-censorship tools (VPNs, proxies, Tor services) it blocks nationally — confirmed across at least three independent networks — and the distribution is not a gradient, it is a cliff:
| Country | Circumvention tools nationally blocked |
|---|---|
| Iran | 75 |
| Russia | 57 |
| Saudi Arabia | 5 |
| China | 4 (see caveats — vastly under-counted) |
| Indonesia | 3 |
| everyone else | 0–2 |
Iran and Russia block roughly ten to fifteen times more circumvention tools than any other measured country. This is the anti-circumvention front of the censorship war, and only two states are really fighting it at scale.
They even block their own people’s tools
The tool lists give it away. Russia’s confirmed blocks include amnezia.org — Amnezia, a VPN built by Russian developers to resist Russian censorship — alongside AdGuard VPN and a wall of commercial services. Iran blocks 20speed.co (a domestic Iranian VPN) next to AirVPN, HotspotShield, TunnelBear and the rest. Blocking the home-grown circumvention tool, not just the foreign ones, is the signature of a state determined to close every exit.
The data tracks the documented 2024–25 crackdown
Voidly’s confirmed-block counts are not a measurement quirk — they mirror a well-reported escalation. In Russia, Apple delisted an estimated 60–100 VPN apps from its Russian App Store in 2024 at the demand of the censor Roskomnadzor — NordVPN, ExpressVPN, Proton VPN, and on 30 October 2024 the Russian-made Amnezia VPN, removed “per demand from Roskomnadzor” — while a 2024 law outlawed VPN providers that refuse to block Kremlin-blacklisted sites. In Iran, the Supreme Council for Cyberspace prohibited unlicensed VPNs in February 2024, and authorities now block the circumvention protocols themselves — Tor Snowflake, Reality, VMESS, VLESS — not just the tool websites (Freedom House, Freedom on the Net 2024; Filterwatch). OONI maintains a dedicated circumvention-tool reachability tracker for exactly this reason. Voidly is measuring the website-blocking layer of that same campaign.
Honest caveats
(1) These counts are domains carrying Citizen Lab’s anonymization/VPN tag, a
curated list — a floor, not every tool that exists. (2) China is the
glaring under-count. Its four confirmed-blocked tools are a measurement
artifact, not reality: the Great Firewall’s VPN blocking is among the most
aggressive on earth, but OONI records GFW interference as “anomaly”
rather than a confirmed block, so China barely registers in this confirmed layer.
Read Iran and Russia as the high-confirmation leaders, not as the only aggressive
VPN censors. (3) The handful of free countries with one or two entries (Germany,
Netherlands, Sweden) are single-network measurement false positives on a shared
anonymizer domain, not national policy — the real story is the Iran/Russia
cliff. (4) Blocking a tool’s website does not always block the tool’s
protocol, and vice-versa; the confirmed layer is a periodic snapshot. Live:
/v1/measurement/category-leaders?category=ANON.