Still let people use the old path system, even on new servers. This is an often-used trick to get around government censorship that will be destroyed with this change.
TBH, though, I'm not sure that would really help that much over time. It's clear there are real benefits for having bucket names in subdomains, such that the majority of new users would pick that format in any case. In that situation, governments may end up just blocking s3.amazon.com in any case because "only old bad guys" continue to use it.
Why S3 must carry the burden of getting around censorship?
If you are talking about China, yeah, Google used to carry that burden. Now GAE, GCloud, Youtube, Gmail are all gone. The whole IP range was blacklisted.
Now what?
Just because something accidentally works does not mean it will last forever.
I believe their point was that a central authority would have finer grained censorship control with the v2 bucket scheme instead of the old path based scheme.
I don't think they really want to. It's literally the biggest reason for the change (they can work around the load balancing issues) and they do not address it at all in the article.
The Internet is not what it use to be, and it's going to become more and more difficult to deal with censorship.
The Internet treats censorship as a malfunction and routes around it.
- John Perry Barlow
