People who confuse adolescents acting out with those who wish to bring about freedom should consider themselves adolescents too.

An adolescent sees no gray in life - there are the virtuous and the corrupt. Wikileaks and 4chan are simply adolescent hangouts.

And “shutting them down” is a bit of a fantasy - not something that can be done.

The Internet sits on top of ethernet which is a collision based protocol. It isn’t like a microphone gets passed around and your ethernet port only speaks when it has the microphone. When your machine has access to a network that is on the Internet, you can speak all you want until that network gets shut by the router that serves it or your mac address gets isolated on that network. If it does, you move to another network. Or another server. No single microphone means no authority determining who can say what when. IBM tried to salvage “Token Ring” with the idea that such censorship was possible, but lost the argument about 25 years ago.

Point to all of this is simple - you have a global electronic community which means adolescents now have access to the entire planetary information infrastructure and now always will. So the impulse to “prank” (which drives 4chan) will be acted on and always will be. New reality.

Will the adolescents learn? Well thousands died as a result of Assange meddling in African elections. That didn’t bother him - he shrugs it off. So the simple answer is “no”.

Uh, what?
Not that I don’t agree, but your Ethernet analogy is completely wrong. The internet doesn’t run on top of it anymore than it runs on top of a Frame relay link. The only thing that defines the internet as the internet is the usage of IP