There are opportunies to penalize businesses that try to impose a tor-hostile website on consumers. For example, a bank has a legal obligation to furnish account statements and tax docs. Some tor-hostile banks outright refuse to give a statement on paper. Other tor-hostile banks charge an extra fee for receiving paper statements.

In these cases, I have had good results with reporting them to a regulator or ombudsman. The bank is generally forced to send you a gratis paper statement. Not by a judge.. this is not court-tested, but it is out-of-court tested. For them it’s not worth a court battle so they can be pursuaded to give paper docs at their own expense. Side-perk: it helps feed the postal service.

It’s also a fight against opacity. They push a vague 403 error, or worse: just quietly drop packets. It’s an assault on our dignity. I have used this against them by simply playing dumb: “Other websites work for me… your website just gives me this screen: ”. Their abusive and disrespectful vagueness rightfully backfires. They always say “we have had no other complaints”, but then what? Not my problem.

It’s not just banks. There are countless gov institutions arbitrarily blocking Tor. In every such case where they have an obligation to furnish info, Tor users should be forcing them to produce paper as if we are offline. This also helps the people who are actually offline. They need our support and we need theirs.

the GDPR angle

Blocking Tor has the effect of forcing people to use clearnet, which in turn forces people to reveal their IP address to the webmaster and also reveal to their ISP where they are visiting. Article 5 of the GDPR requires data minimization. It could be argued that Tor-hostile sites in Europe are violating the GDPR, particularly if they have no analog alternative.