I agree that it’s likely impossible to completely sensor information. What is much more feasible is to add so much friction/risk to spreading it, that it defact

I agree that it’s likely impossible to completely sensor information. What is much more feasible is to add so much friction/risk to spreading it, that it defacto is unavailable to 99% of people. I would argue that legalizing marijuana massively increased consumption (because so much friction and risk went away), legalizing encryption massively increased adoption on the internet (compared to a world where it was formally illegal and ISPs were used to enforce mandatory cleartext), bans on medical drugs without prescription have reduced how much people develop experimental drugs, bans on child porn have massively reduced number of people ever exposed to it, etc. I think most information bans can be enforced with such high effectiveness that it becomes difficult to consider a society in which that weren’t the case. Much of “regulatory reform” is actually about legalizing and normalizing behavior/information that was always doable but banned. Rarely does the government invent a new type of behavior (patent law is a good example of that).