You're that typical someone that chimes in with the worst possible thing that they imagine could happen if censorship is not enforced. Then when it's pointed out that censorship is still undesirable, that typical somone retorts "Well what if <horrible thing> happened to you/your mum/dog/gerbil?!".

There's a balance between being afraid of your own shadow and being reasonably careful/safe. Think about that.

Because I use a specific technique to highlight an issue implies nothing about 'me' except that I can use that technique. Your argument would be stronger if you focus on the issue, not the person.

You used the words "reasonably careful/safe", which I assume means you're not subscribing to an extremist position. Similarly, I don't hold an extremist position on this and am simply highlighting that there are grey areas that Google has to deal with. If it were easy, they'd have made an obvious decision years ago and wouldn't need to change it.

What if the first returned thing is the child pornography page on wikipedia and other news and resources on the subject? Doesn't have to return actual pics and videos. Yes it's still censorship of something but in this case instant search just doesn't auto complete to anything yet if you search for the term it will return the result list un filtered.

yes? why wouldn't they?

You might feel differently if your kid had been raped, say. When you only have one principle to deal with, life is simple, but I think there are grey areas in all these issues.

Similarly, the argument to legalise drugs. Personally, I agree with the argument, but a similar demand-supply problem exists in human trafficking (e.g. child sex slavery), but there I think the laws should continue to keep the latter illegal even while it supports the high profits that human traffickers can make. What do you think?

hmm? 'Rape' has auto suggestions.

In general I dont think that consumption of child pornography is much of a crime, the harm has been done by then, and some poor sad git masturbating over a 3 year old isn't going to make it any worse.

Personally I would rather they put significant resources into catching those people who create it, than into changing search engines and blocking dns addresses so that everyone can pretend it doesn't exist.

Demand encourages supply.

Even if nobody's paying?

Given the threat our lawmakers believe piracy poses to content-producers, and that they wish to suppress the production of child porn, perhaps they should actually encourage the piracy of child porn...

(I jest, of course, but the law itself is none too rational here.)

Your demand for censorship encourages supply of censorship, so I guess we should throw you in jail.

All else equal, the difference is that taking drugs (may) harm the user, and only the user, while taking a slave obviously involves another person.

Good point. So there would be a set of things that infringe on others' rights, are therefore illegal and therefore support high profits, separate from those that don't infringe and could therefore be legalised.