The Internet should not be censored and, unfortunately for those who might disagree, any attempt to do so is doomed from the outset to fail miserably. A fundamental tenet upon which the Internet has been built and to which it owes much of its continued success is the free exchange of all forms of information. This ideal holds regardless of your location on the planet, but in the United States it is safeguarded by the First Amendment as a form of protected speech. As with other forms of speech, disagreement is not grounds for censorship. However, this does not absolve Internet users of all responsibility — content illegal in traditional media is also illegal when presented online. Additionally, users are still free to choose what content they do and do not want to consume, but they should not expect some magical device to protected them from such undesirables. Just as there is no magical pair of glasses you can wear to obscure things you don’t want to see, there is no Internet filter capable of removing all unwanted content while leaving the rest untouched. The only safe and sure way to filter the Internet is by using the best content identification and pattern recognition tool mankind has in its toolbox: the human brain.
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