I have workloads on hetzner data centers in Finnland and Germany. Hetzner owns part of that cable, to connect those sites.

Tracerout gives me a path like this spine5.cloud2.fsn1.hetzner.com -> core22.fsn1.hetzner.com -> core5.fra.hetzner.com -> core53.sto.hetzner.com -> core31.hel1.hetzner.com

Which is worse than before, but still works for me.

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By the way, the original adage from John Gilmore ("The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it") was referring to a behavior of Usenet rather than of the Internet. In particular, if articles didn't reach a node by one path, the node would still accept that they were missing (according to Usenet routing rules) and accept those articles from a different path. Thus, one could not prevent Usenet messages or newsgroups from reaching most of Usenet merely by deleting or not forwarding them on a single node. Another way of putting this is that the connectivity of Usenet was (in general though not everywhere) a web rather than a tree, and the Usenet software didn't assume that messages had to be forwarded along some particular path, if another path was available.

As with Jon Postel's maxim (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robustness_principle) people have also subsequently applied this to human behavior, not just the behavior of particular software.

There were ultimately more technically sophisticated means of censorship available on Usenet that were somewhat more effective.

I think it was late 2012 or early 2013 when I was in India (Hyderabad) at a time when an earthquake in the Mediterranean Sea cut I think it was SEA-WE-ME 3. The internet was terrible for the next two weeks, until the cable was repaired: almost half the internet flat-out didn’t work, including most USA hosts. I have no idea why communication between India and the USA, which should head east, was affected by a break to the west in the Mediterranean. I do know that local ISPs often have fairly dodgy peering arrangements.

My workaround was to tunnel via my own VPS in Singapore, as I could connect to it and but I was using OpenVPN back then and performance was pretty terrible. (Now if I want such tunnelling I use WireGuard, and it’s much better.)

Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42198635