I think an important realization to make, is that you can't fully stop behaviour that you find unethical. If somebody has an incentive for doing it, then it's going to happen, somewhere, somehow, in some way.

Therefore, the equation changes - it's not about what least accomodates those with (in your view) unethical behaviour, but about what most accomodates those with ethical behaviour.

That is why highways and Tor make sense, from an ethical point of view, despite them being used for things you ethically disagree with - because those things would happen regardless (there's incentive after all), and you're simply making ethical behaviour easier.

A similar equation applies to DRM, actually, and to why it doesn't and can't work. Those with 'bad' intentions (ie. pirates) have the incentive to break it anyway - financial incentive for commercial pirates, "for the fun of it" for non-commercial pirates.

Your actual customers, however, don't have that incentive, and to them it's an insurmountable wall that they can't get over, even though all they wanted to do was fix a bug that you as a vendor hadn't had time to follow up on yet.

Not using DRM wouldn't change anything about the 'unethical' behaviour - they were going to pirate it anyway - but it would make things better for those with 'ethical' behaviour.

Maybe think of it this way, if you were a construction worker and helped build an interstate, you'd be helping all sorts of criminals do all sorts of horrible things. Plus innocent people would die in car crashes on the road you helped to build. But we can agree that the utility of an interstate far outweighs these drawbacks.

With a fully distributed model, everyone is essentially running a backbone server. If you don't feel comfortable with such an arrangement, then you'd probably have to opt out. There are plenty of people willing to put up with it, evidenced by the number of companies who have no problem operating the current Internet backbone despite knowing for a fact that their networks are used to distribute child porn and other illegal things. Generally, I think the law is on the side of the distributor, but that's only a legal consolation, not a moral one. I just don't see a way around it. To be fair though, the likelihood of this happening is probably going to be much lower than for a backbone provider, especially if users only serve up content they've consumed themselves (seems like a logical assumption in the distributed system I'm thinking about, but does not have to hold true for all such systems).

The burden of supporting free speech is supporting speech that you may disagree with. Reputable civil liberties organizations like the ACLU regularly fight to protect the rights of groups (KKK[0], neo-Nazis[1], etc.) that they disagree with. You do not have to support the content of someone's speech to support their right to free speech.

[0] https://www.aclu.org/news/aclu-em-defends-kkks-right-free-sp...

[1] https://www.aclu.org/aclu-history-taking-stand-free-speech-s...

It all reduces down to this: tech X can enable Y evil things so should we allow X to exist? Interstates were a good example as traffickers depend heavily on them. Cameras are vital to spread of child porn online. Printing presses and printers if not that. Pencils if it gets down to sketching. They're even doing animated stuff according to some sources: there goes any non-locked-down video game system. Traffickers also use cars, 18 wheelers, trains, and boats.

The tool/tech X can aid evil Y is weak because the good from X far outweighs Y. There's always an evil minority. Obsessive people motivated by control or money will find a way to act on those motivations. They'll use whatever tools are at their disposal. We shouldn't stop having freedom, privacy, Internet anonymity, etc w/ all the benefits because an abuse might happen. That you possessed or sold a technology someone might have abused is on them, not you. And they're pretty good at getting away with it even without anonymity tools or crypto.

But, believe me, most Americans are happy to abuse the hell out of children with tech so long as it's the foreign children building America's tech for 10-12 hr straight at horrid wages and conditions to make that tech cheaper. ;) What you worry about is at record lows and what I just mentioned is at record highs. American double standard, just them worrying about the wrong things, or both?