Telegram actually handles this well (better than some other similar chat apps like LINE, Viber, ...)
It has an option inside Security and Privacy, in the subsection on "Calls", where you can limit who can contact you using P2P calls and who will have the call routed through a central server of Telegram.
So usually you can restrict P2P only to your contacts for example, and everyone else will have calls routed to Telegram central server (or just disable calling altogether for everyone else)
Using google maps to spot out a non-touristy area was ingenious.
I live near the spot you showed in the example that you picked.
I would suggest next time trying out another method, not based on restaurants, but on using Historical Map: look at the city and go back 100 years, then look at the city in the present, and either choose a place that has not changed at all, or a place that was a slum and now is housing.
I remember this being done back when Opera 7 was used. I think it had a feature for mobile OS, where it would route requests to Opera's servers and serve clients a minified, smaller version of the page, so people on 2G at the time could still use the web. I don't remember people being outraged at the time at the prospect of a browser having a baked-in VPN option though.
I remember this as well and thought it was a neat service. One that I would have liked to emulate using my own proxy in order to save bandwidth on my mobile data but never got around to actually doing.
These days with widespread HTTPS, the only way to do this is to bake it into the browser itself.
And of course, this was back when you could trust Opera to do what they said they were (or weren't) doing.
That was Opera Mini, and it's still around (and popular in areas where Internet speed is still measured in Kbps and/or you pay for data per megabyte).
It's not even that it served a minified version, too. It basically did all layout server-side, so the client got something more akin to a PDF of the webpage optimized for its screen size. It also compressed images.
At the time, spyware was not yet a mainstream business model so there was no outrage because respectable, established companies didn't yet become spyware operators. There was still mutual trust back in the day.
op actually edited the comment like 4 time to try and make the spoiler tag work. So op, for what it's worth, ROT13 (google) is a good idea for spoilers in the future :)
All of the above countries, including countries not mentioned in your example, have the right to order the content to be taken down, following their own country's regulations.
"Taking down content" can range from blocking the site from being accessible from inside the country, to organising measures together with other countries where the site is actually hosted to take down the site at its roots, should the country allow it.
North Korea, China, Russia are prime examples of blocking being heavily used to control the Internet.
A government's model will never be "inadequate" as long as people live there and abide by the country's law because of various incentives (economical, sociological, familial, ...).
The way I used to write/set-up tests when I was teaching is that you could use a limited set of online resources to answer, but if you have to search every question you won't have enough time to do it. So it also tested your ability to quickly locate the information you need should you not know it right away.
I hate that I had to double check when you said "GNS uses crypto" and realised you meant crypto as in cryptography, not the other meaning commonly associated with blockchain coins.
