Correct, badlands and other features like node rotation, homomorphic encryption and multi party computation are the only way to solve the issue. Otherwise dApps which are illegal in all 1st world countries (possibly due to being against US laws) won’t be able to run in data centers hosted there and only nodes in minor countries will be able to host those dApps, resulting in reduced decentralization and worse UX as I said above.
Dfinity plans to solve the issue in the short term by allowing boundary nodes to blacklist controversial canisters, this is a stopgap to protect node operators but doesn’t solve the issue cause:
- Atm all boundary nodes are run by Dfinity, so they’ll probably share the same policy
- Dfinity stated this:
Since boundary nodes generally serve specific geographies and jurisdictions, this makes it possible that canisters will be accessible in some places, but not others, depending upon where legal action occurs.
So if you live in the US and all boundary nodes there don’t serve a canister it won’t be accessible to all US users. I made a post about this months ago if you are interested in the topic: Decentralization on the IC moving forward