[Edit: I wish people would stop voting down the parent. It is a legitimate point of view and down-voting is supposed to express a lack of value, not disagreemen

[Edit: I wish people would stop voting down the parent. It is a legitimate point of view and down-voting is supposed to express a lack of value, not disagreement with content] Child pornography is basically the trump card of the pro-censorship argument. Nobody is in favour of it, everybody thinks it's awful, even really passionate freedom-of-speech types often think an "except for child pornography" clause is an allowable compromise. But the truth is that anybody who wants child pornography on the Internet can already get it, if they try hard enough. Many of us who've worked for large web companies are aware that one of the first forms of abuse that happens to any service that allows image uploading is that it starts getting used to distribute child porn. Shutting down domain names will do nothing because the people who deal in this stuff have been having their shit seized and shut down for years already. By the same token, DNS is not essential to preventing censorship. We can send each other IP addresses through social networks, distribute shortlinks to servers that change every hour, or any one of a hundred other methods. The balance to strike is: is censorship of material we think legitimate happening often enough right now that we want to make it easier to route around, knowing that doing so will make it harder to censor stuff that we find universally objectionable? A month ago I'd have said no, but today I'm not so sure. And that's a dangerous consequence of the actions the US government is taking in response to these leaks. By cracking down, they risk provoking a revolution that will make it impossible to control these things in future.