[mrmental]

John Gilmore said: "The net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it."
There are many more hackers than lawmakers who really understand the internet out there, and the hackers are smarter.
A lot smarter.
Lawmakers think in straight lines, and hackers think in a much more oblique way. Therefore if you put a barrier in front of a hacker he or she treats it as an interesting obstacle to overcome, whilst the actual placing of the barriers is much more onerous and depressing.
The reason governments are panicking about controlling the internet is because they've just realized the extent to which the control they want is impossible. The net is us. We detect damage? We route around.