> Do we want pedophiles unencumbered access to the internet?

Why do you care? If they are online, preferably drawing pictures of young children or something, it gives them an outlet to their fetish that does not involve violently assulting children.

In a grayer and probably more nihilistic tense, even if they share already produced child pornography, all those violent assults have already been performed in the past. If it can stop future assults by giving pedophiles material in the now to sate their lust, then restricting it is just enabling more child rape because they don't have alternative outlets.

Seriously, at this point, it is all just ones and zeroes. And those don't hurt people. It is an injustice and terrible on the part of any rape victim to think lewd imagery of themselves is circulating the Internet giving pedophiles an opportunity to get it off, but it already is. And nothing we do can put the cork back on all the child porn already circulating hard drives around the world. They just use VPNs, TOR, and other anonymizing services to hide their activity that puts up a barrier to entry to less technically inclined pedophiles who then vent their frustrations out on people in the physical realm.

Let them do their thing in a dark corner of the Internet, that is still public and in the open, that is highly scrutinized by law enforcement to immediately catch and arrest anyone that commits new injustices against children, but it direly harms the potential of a free Internet to dictate policy due to the exception.

In the same vein of thought, the Internet enables terrorists and for hire murders to collude and plan violence against others. But you can do that in person. The thing with the Internet is that it does not enable anything you could not do standing next to someone - you just get information exchange anywhere. And if you cannot restrict information exchange in person, then restricting it digitally does little good and only stymies the potential of the Internet.

That's very true. It's the freedom vs. chaos dichotomy that all societies have to struggle with at one time or another. As for pedophiles, I believe this is the domain of real world social services. Abuse doesn't occur in a vacuum and there are always signs to look for, both in schools, with friends and the local neighborhood.

Of course, competent workers in social services and an adequate budget in this field are other troublesome subjects, but I do believe no crime takes place online without a real world component. Therefore, there should be real world clues to follow.

Good point that stopping pedophiles from using the web won't stop pedophiles. It's that kind of global view of these things that we need more of, and I suspect was missing when this tax-bandwidth idea was put together.