A couple weeks ago we wrote about the unfortunate decision by Google to stop enabling domain fronting on its AppEngine. As we explained at the time, this was an (accidental) way of hiding certain traffic by using the way certain large companies had set up their online services, such that censors in, say, Iran or China, couldn"t distinguish which traffic was for an anti-censorship app, and which was for others. The two largest services that enabled this were Google and Amazon, and a variety of different anti-censorship tools made use of the ability to effectively "hide" within those sites such that an authoritarian government couldn"t block their apps without blocking all of Google or Amazon or whatever. Some CDNs have admitted that they don"t allow it out of a fear for how it could impact other users on the system, but on the whole it appeared to be a useful, if unintended, way for Google and Amazon to do good in the world.
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