@Guido Esperanto

The problem is that there's far too much hysteria about this, particularly in Anglo-Saxon countries. Wanting to tackle genuine child abuse is one thing, but then arresting parents because they take a photo of their children playing at bathtime, or a school kid because he has a topless photo of his 17-year old girlfriend on his mobile phone, is a quite barmy overreaction in my opinion, and risks bringing the whole system into disrepute.

The majority stance?

Unlikely. Most if not all of us will probably agree that sexually abusing children is a pretty bad no-no. What to do about it is something else entirely.

For one, the "at all costs" bit would justify imprisonment or extermination of the entire male population. Come to think of it, there's been cases of wimmins abusing children too innit? Can't be too cautious, let's do the same to them. Nobody left to care for the children? What a pity, but at least there's nobody left to make child porn!

I'm quite sure there's very few people who would go quite that far.

Before you complain that's over the top: Yes, yes it is. But that's what "at all costs" implies: No holds barred, everything is fair game, anything goes, including throwing sanity right out the window. Which is what generally happens when moral panics get a hold on the politicians, as happened with the child porn scare.

You said "at all costs". If you don't want to go quite that far then don't say you want to. Otherwise you indeed run the risk of sounding like a daily fail reader.

And blocking is a bad idea anyway. Even forgetting that even an EU wide block wouldn't be able to block everything. There would always be false positives and false negatives even before people got smart and found ways around it--as happens all the time in China and elsewhere. Sweeping the evidence under the rug isn't quite the same as punishing past or current abuse or even preventing future abuse. So you have to ask yourself: What is it that we really want or do not want? What do we want to focus our efforts on? Finding perpetrators of actual abuse or harass people for mere possession of pervy pictures?

There are so many much better things than introducing EU-wide blocklist red tape that you can do. Things that will actually help prevent abuse and help abused children get over it and punish offenders and prevent them from doing it again that it's really quite a shame that people opt for the lazy censorship cop-out. Especially since the damage done by imposing censorhip --it attracts more censorship, proposals for that have already surfaced in fact-- is a direct attack on our liberties and with that a clear attack on democracy.

So what is it that you really want? Do you want quick feel-good papering-over, or would you rather go the long, hard, arduous way of going after the actual abusing-of-kids?