If I'm not mistaken, signal is specifically hosted on AWS to so that governments can't just blacklist their IPs without blacklisting all of AWS. So moving to bare metal isn't really an option.
You can't win every fight. In this case, they're (intentionally or not) making a trade-off between being easier for governments to censor, and easier for Amazon to censor. I guess in their case, the many governments in the world are a bigger threat than Amazon specifically.
They actually get around SNI blocks (or did, I'm not sure if anymore) with a technique called "domain fronting". If I recall correctly, AWS wasn't so happy about it when it was bought to their attention and they were asked to stop. There was even some discussion on HN about it. Not exactly sure what the current state is.
> Governments can easily block AWS as well and they have. Even simpler, they just go for the kill-switch and kill internet.
They can, but the collateral damage of doing that is high, which is a deterrent. The only regimes where that's realistically an option are ones where they've consciously developed an independent tech ecosystem (e.g. China) or where their power is so secure they couldn't care less about the damage.
Unless you are talking about very stable countries(where this is not even an issue to begin with), we have already seen a few(russia, india etc) doing this without a second thought, not just china. The damage can be attributed to someone else when you own the communication channels.
> we have already seen a few(russia, india etc) doing this without a second thought, not just china. The damage can be attributed to someone else when you own the communication channels.
Russia might fall under the category of "regimes...where their power is so secure they couldn't care less about the damage," and it appears they did in fact see a lot of collateral damage during the attempt. India's blocks look to be localized an temporary.
