The blocking is tedious, but very effective...for the government.
It is just another example of the double standards so happily used here and basically it is a tax by the rich on the poor. The rich can easily bypass the censorship by using proxies and VPNs, they (we) have the money for it.
The poor cannot easily do the same as they access the net mostly from Internet cafes.
There is a real economic cost, so just waving it away as irrelevant is a bit silly. I have to pay for VPN every month. Money that I could have spend for more productive uses. Multiply that by 68 million and just those costs of censorship are huge. That's just the VPN. I wont even start about the countless lost investment opportunities to develop a competitive knowledge based economy.
Further, the blocking slows down the internet tremendously. If you have ever been to a free country you will have experienced that an uncensored slow 2 MB connection is faster than a True Thai 8 MB line. Everything here has to go through government firewalls, so there is a significant slowdown in the overall experience.
I have met plenty of young Thais who are curious about all the naughty information on the ones who lord over them. But most all 20 year old Thais I have met are pretty ignorant about the world and their own country's place in it.
Compared to their brethren I meet abroad even university students often strike me as almost dull. It is because the censoring is so effective as part of the overall goal to keep the people compliant and ignorant.
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