EU Security Commissioner wants to prevent searching for bad things

First of all, I'll give him a bit of slack. I assume he didn't really mean to sound quite so silly and simplistic. More likely he wants search engines to not list certain types of site content--just as they currently warn about potentially dangerous content.

However, even after removing the silly-season flavor of the quotation... it just doesn't work. In the first place, what's special about the internet? Are we going to censor libraries as well? Restrict access to certain types of biological and chemical information? Require a security clearance to get a degree in physics?

In the second place, has he for a single moment paid any attention to what happens anytime someone tries to censor anything else on the internet, whether it be a video on YouTube, or the key to a DVD encryption scheme? It instantly turns into a game. Your secret information gets published on thousands of sites. It's duplicated through the DNS system. It shows up on t-shirts. And the more you fight it, the more publicity it gets, and soon everyone's grandmother has heard about it and is searching for it online. It's not just that global internet censorship doesn't work--it's that it invariably makes things worse!

And finally of course. None of this keeps the ”bad guys“ from getting the information. No matter how hard you try, the information is out there. Just as DRM gets in the way of normal users, but does nothing to stop professional theives--internet censorship makes life hard for legitimate access, and yet fails to keep the information out of the hands of criminals.

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