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Great comment.

> won't require her to seek out dubious illegal channels which are likely to be full of stuff much "worse" than she'd easily have found without all the censorship.

This is one of my biggest fears.

As an analogy (and a true story); they banned selling knives on ebay[1]. Now I have to go to specialist knife-selling websites to buy my knives (I am a collector). Those websites have a much better range and promote knives much better than ebay did.

[1] http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7879701.stm



"Hardcore" porn (anything with penetration or erect penises) was illegal in Norway when I was a child. As a result my generations source of porn was illegal imports sold in shady shops which, because they were already breaking the law, had few reasons to avoid selling anything that was available from their sources.

So if you wanted just "mainstream" porn, you'd get that from places with prominent displays of all kinds of fetishes many of us would never have even heard of otherwise.

Then came the BBS's, and the same was the case - normal mainstream stuff in between every fetish imaginable.

Now I don't necessarily see that as a problem, but it does mean that by adding these kind of restrictions, they are effectively losing all control. They are also likely to massively hasten the move towards technologies to better anonymous, encrypted browsing.

If anything drives "darknets" and systems like Tor to the next level, it will be more extensive porn filtering even more so than piracy, especially because of the amount of money in porn that is legally manufactured and distributed, but that is or may become illegal in large potential markets.




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