Seeing how search results are being censored in “free countries” due to things like the DMCA and The Right To Be Forgotten, maybe we shouldn’t look to private companies to fix this issue.
https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachm...
That's the UK government explaining how it's going to enforce a worldwide requirement for Age Verification on all sites with (what it considers to be) pornographic material.
Now regardless of whether you think this policy goal makes any actual sense, or whether a potential regulator would even try to do more than clamp down on UK porn companies that don't do age verification, the mechanism described has two halves to it:
1. UK ISPs voluntarily block non-complaint sites in DNS
2. Hopefully everybody uses their ISP's DNS servers
Why doesn't it say the UK government will make every ISP run all connections through a government-owned proxy to enforce these rules regardless of DNS? Because that would cost an eye-watering amount of money and "We had to raise taxes by 10% for our anti-pornography law" is a guaranteed vote loser. It would also be ineffective but let's see them spend that money first.
The reason is that the law is only a political battle. Once the battle and the marketing are over non of this law or how it is or is not implemented. At best you get a bunch of bureaucrats in place that monitor these things and write a report every so often. Those will be ignored until some politician is again interested in fighting this battle.
It is nothing to do with censorship where the actual source is removed, as with the right to be forgotten and DMCA takedowns.