Should governments be able to block websites?

[RichardGv]

The basic idea: I do not think a government-driven country-wide Internet censorship is ever just.

• As all the powers that belongs to the "visible hand", the fatal problem of government controlled Internet censorship is the lack of proper self-regulation and high probability of abuse. In rather authoritarian countries it's more clearly exhibited, such as DPRK (Huh, basically no Internet), Burma ('The internet is regulated by the Electronic Act which bans the importing and use of a modem without official permission, and the penalty for violating this is a 15 year prison sentence, as it is considered "damaging state security, national unity, culture, the national economy and law and order."'), South Korea (...'maintains a wide-ranging approach toward the regulation of specific online content and imposes a substantial level of censorship on elections-related discourse and on a large number of Web sites that the government deems subversive or socially harmful'...), China (hundred of thousands of sites blocked, including Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare, BBC, VOA, and some Google services, thousands of people monitored or arrested for saying "improper" words on the Internet), and Cuba, yet it also happens in democratic countries, like India and Russia.
  
• Even if the government itself does not abuse the censoring system, that the content to censor are decided democratically, there are still chances that the freedom of some individuals or groups of individuals been violated. There's a bad point in human nature, that we are inclined to attack or even eliminate anybody who holds an idea deviating from what we believe, or have different behaviors that we consider abnormal, even though they don't affect our live at all. Surely with ever-heightening level of education, the masses have become much wiser, and the machine of democracy is more effective then ever, yet it is not perfect yet, and it's well possible that the pursue to what people consider "justice" would step personal freedom under his feet. Socrates was trailed and executed in the democratic Athens, for "corrupting the minds of the youth of Athens", and another more recent exhibition of the tendency was the raise of McCarthyism after World War II. (Hmm, sorry, I know quite little about the western history, so I cannot offer more examples.) Today we still have discriminations, towards different groups of the people, the black, the homosexuals, the Jews, or towards some special behaviors that are not particularly unreasonable, but "we just hate it". (In the more religious countries, especially the Islamic ones, the problem is horribly severe.) When these discriminations get reflected on the policy of censoring contents of the Internet... Well, you know what will happen.
  
• Censorship is in no sense a cure of piracy. Whatever is needed by the masses, there will be somebody supplying it. When PirateBay is banned, people will create PirateGulf; when PirateGulf is banned, people will create PirateStrait, then someday PirateOcean. And what makes it even worse is, Internet is a space where all kinds of information can be easily copied and losslessly & anonymously distributed -- a bless for most of us, and a curse for software/game/movie/music producers. Miserable software/game/movie/music producers develop thousands of DRM techniques, and people ultimately find a way to deal with most of them. The final result is governments and the corporations throws billions of dollars into it, but get trapped in an infinite race game, and they never actually win. (Actually, there is indeed one way to stop piracy: Dramatically increase the cost of piracy, and hang every person using pirated software, but hmm, will anybody ever agree on that? I think the the solution of pirate is to make most content freely available, and create profits with special support services and related physical products instead. )
  
• A quite minor issue is, all sorts of censorships affect speed in a certain degree, and they cost money from taxpayers. Seems the Internet censorship here (in China) add 100-200 ms ping latency. Disaster if you like to play online games.
  

Censorship specifically targeted at a group of people who lacks the necessary ability of judgments (e.g. children) or in particular public places (Well, it does not sound like the greatest idea in the world to allow teachers to view gay porn in the school...), though, might be appropriate. It also makes sense to prevent extremist/terrorism content from appearing publicly on the Internet, such as, an extension tutorial for making bombs and fire it in front of a school building, since it's way beyond the extent of freedom and tolerance one deserves.

Oh my god, this reply took me almost two hours...