There are three main ways to do P2P content distribution. One is like BitTorrent, where you only host the content you yourself wanted. This has obvious privacy issues. Anyone can tell what you read/view based on what you host.
The second is you distribute content to random hosts, who don't even know what it is (so they can't associate it with whoever is downloading it). This solves the privacy problem and has adequate performance but it only works if you don't have bad laws that impose liability on people even if they aren't knowingly hosting something illegal. Otherwise the government can prosecute a couple of random innocent people and put enough fear into everyone else that they move back to Facebook.
The third is onion routing. Then it's hard to shut down specific hosts (you don't know who they are), but it's slow and if your laws are sufficiently bad it can be made illegal to use it at all even if you aren't doing anything wrong. At that point you go down the road into Tor Project vs. Chinese Firewall, but that's just a disgraceful way to have to operate your communities in a democracy. And for every bug an innocent person goes to prison.
Thats so depressing that we have to have serious discussions about technical countermeasures against our oppressive EU regime. Just because of some old ignorant evil assholes. Time to leave the EU I suppose.
If the solution were technical we would need a combination of 2 and 3. Distributed hidden services. Is this even possible?
The problem with technical solutions is basically Child Abuse Images. I am a big believer in freedom and privacy. I am also a big believer in protecting children. Many people understandably prefer protecting children to seemingly (to them) abstract concepts like freedom. Any technical solution needs a method to remove certain content - and as soon as such a method exists people will want to abuse it for political reasons.
The solution has to be political not technical - somehow we need a political situation where basic freedoms are respected. This can only exist as revisions to countrys' constitutions. Simple laws protecting freedom are too easy to overturn. And we can't carry on resisting re-heated versions of the same stupid law every two years.
> If the solution were technical we would need a combination of 2 and 3. Distributed hidden services. Is this even possible?
It is possible.
> The problem with technical solutions is basically Child Abuse Images.
This is a fake reason which is only used as a justification for censorship technologies. In practice it's better to allow distribution so that it happens in the open and new images can be discovered sooner and traced back to the perpetrators who created them. If you shut down a distribution network every time you find it then the only ones that exist are the ones you don't know about, which means you have no source of evidence to make cases against unknown active pedophiles.
The FBI had a successful campaign where they quietly seized a distribution server and then continued operating it so they could collect evidence and make cases against those using it. Naturally the headlines were "FBI distributes child pornography" rather than "FBI arrests many child pornographers" as though preventing distribution is somehow more important than arresting the creators and rescuing the children.
The second is you distribute content to random hosts, who don't even know what it is (so they can't associate it with whoever is downloading it). This solves the privacy problem and has adequate performance but it only works if you don't have bad laws that impose liability on people even if they aren't knowingly hosting something illegal. Otherwise the government can prosecute a couple of random innocent people and put enough fear into everyone else that they move back to Facebook.
The third is onion routing. Then it's hard to shut down specific hosts (you don't know who they are), but it's slow and if your laws are sufficiently bad it can be made illegal to use it at all even if you aren't doing anything wrong. At that point you go down the road into Tor Project vs. Chinese Firewall, but that's just a disgraceful way to have to operate your communities in a democracy. And for every bug an innocent person goes to prison.