Yep. Blacklists, and there's some other techniques (like blacklisting on the DHT).
This opens up the door to censorship too though, so it has to work like the web does now: individuals and groups can select whether to serve things or not depending on their own views. Same for Routing.
A twist on the previous question, would there be any way for me to deliberately choose to be completely ignorant of what I am serving, like running a Tor relay node (or like in Filecoin, if I understand that protocol correctly)? I would be a bit worried about the liability implications of having the ability to filter content I'm serving, but not having the time and resources to actually do any filtering.
As a non-lawyer, I would guess that you would receive the same safe harbor as ISPs do today: they can filter the content they serve, but don't until it's specifically reported to them, and aren't liable for those transmissions.
Even if, say, someone published a list of known illegally-transmitted copyrighted files, you could still make a strong argument that you don't trust the source of the list and would need to receive and review a specific report of each instance of copyright violation that went through your service, like the current DMCA model. (Again, though, not a lawyer.)
I see, thanks. Obviously any time you can delete things you can be forced to do so, leading to censorship, but I think the tradeoff is worth it. Meaning, letting people choose to not serve content they don't like will lead to more nodes hosting most content, while not overly impacting nodes that are willing to host the rest. Systems like these really need critical mass to get going.
That's how the internet works. If people are doing illegal things (like standing up to a totalitarian regime), they take on the risk of repercussion. (We can't tell a-priori what the information content is reliably).
People shouldn't accidentally store illegal things they don't mean to (hence blacklists) but you also don't want to snuff out freedom of speech of those who understand + are willing to take the risk. The issue is routing access to it is also considered hosting it (dcma takedowns for links on the web).
I think that the best thing is to have the default DHT include blacklists that can be updated to handle DMCA requests. Sort of like DNS works today. Definitely something that we'll have to figure out as time goes on.
This opens up the door to censorship too though, so it has to work like the web does now: individuals and groups can select whether to serve things or not depending on their own views. Same for Routing.