Ger­many is cur­rent­ly set­ting up some in­ter­net fil­ter­ing. In The Nether­lands there were also plans like that, but the thing I don't un­der­stand in the Ger­man sit­u­a­tion is that they seem to be more hon­est about that it's not aimed at ab­solute­ly block­ing those sites. The fil­ter­ing is most­ly just a list of do­main names that the name servers of the co­op­er­at­ing ISPs won't re­solve to their orig­i­nal ip num­ber, but redi­rect to a page ex­plain­ing why it is blocked. In The Nether­lands that sys­tem is pre­sent­ed by politi­cians as that they are block­ing ac­cess to those sites, while in Ger­many they say they make it only hard­er to get to those sites. It's good that they are hon­est about that, but I think they mis­un­der­es­ti­mat­ed how easy it then still is. Since it's goal is to jam the com­mer­cial mar­ket, won't that com­mer­cial mar­ket just re­lease some soft­ware pack­age that makes it triv­ial to get around the fil­ter? Isn't a sig­nif­i­cant part of the cus­tomers of that mar­ket al­ready us­ing TOR or Freenet? And if the gen­er­al pub­lic isn't al­ready smart enough to fig­ure those things out, does a sys­tem that only works as long as the gov­ern­ment keeps the gen­er­al pub­lic un­e­d­u­cat­ed about those things re­al­ly help so­ci­ety?

Do politi­cians re­al­ly want to say some­thing along the lines of "We al­most solved the prob­lem, at least our stu­pid Burg­erin­nen und Burg­er won't be caus­ing any­more trou­ble, and we there­fore can only hope most of them are stu­pid."? Well, isn't that why those politi­cians got elect­ed in the first place?