Google chief Eric Schmidt explains block on child porn

What people fail to realise when they scream “let’s get rid of child porn” is that they become part of the problem. It’s sort of like saying “let’s get rid of the bodies so no one will notice that there’s a genocide”. It works if your aim is to prevent people from noticing that there’s a problem, but it doesn’t aid the victims nor prevent new victims. In fact by hiding the symptoms you prevent the proper level of outrage and counter action.

Imagine every image of every child that has been or is being abused is instantly findable on the web and presented front and centre to anyone searching for terms that relate to children.

How many images of child abuse do you think you would see before you would hit the streets and force our police to hunt these people down and nail their balls to a wall in a court of law? How much funding would such an effort garner then? How effective could the police be if there were serious pressure on them to actually do something?

Instead we ask companies like Google to hide those pictures from us knowing full well that this will not stop child pornography. We take any pressure off our police and our courts to actually do something. We allow politicians to skate by with claiming to do something about child pornography when in reality they are just hiding it from us.

Instead we we allow governments to regulate speech. Yes it’s speech that we find abhorrent, but it is speech. We forfeit our liberties for the sake of the children while at the same time doing them a disservice. After all, it’s the acts that lead to those images and not the images that are abhorrent and that is where the crime should be sought out and punished.