Another thought on censorship

Thinking further about the Chinese censorship study, one line in the conclusion caught my eye:"The state employs a sophisticated infrastructure that ... tolerates overblocking as the price of preventing access to prohibited sites."

This reminds me of the battles in the 1990s over censoring obscene material from the internet in order to prevent children from finding it. Some schemes involved some sort of age verification requirement; others required libraries and other public computing facilities to put filtering software on their computers to prevent patrons from using them to look at lewd material. Inevitably, these filters filtered out too much--there were stories about people not being able to find information about cancer because the webpages had the word "breast" on them. In the end, the filtering schemes failed because Americans weren't willing to "tolerate overblocking as the price of preventing access to prohibited sites."