. . . bear in mind that the entire world fought the SOPA and PIPA bills as too draconian. Those bills would have allowed, if passed, the government to do much more.
The bills were flawed.
On the other hand, Google is just one of many search engines. European privacy law being what it is, the European search engine ixquick.com does not record IP or other addresses and offers the same information as Google. No amount of hammering Google will stop searches for Internet child porn. It will take more than that, a paradigm shift in how people think about children. (Good luck.)
Thus, to exercise such vast control powers over Websites and ISPs across the world would require truly draconian measures. The Webcomic The Oatmeal dramatically and humorously demonstrated this with its SOPA blackout page, available here. The author noted that if he could get a koala and a goat making love on CNN, he had reached the pinnacle of his cartooning career.
But we could do it. If we wish to tear out the Bill of Rights from our Constitution we could indeed make things difficult (but not impossible) for people who distribute or produce child porn.
As for search engines themselves, they merely index Webpages. They use crawling mechanisms to find every Webpage they can. HTML protocols allow Websites to prohibit crawling of their sites, making them that much more difficult to detect.
One could make an argument that search engines such as Google do a service to the community by exposing said Websites.
As for corporate ethics, the only ethic a corporation must uphold is profit. Everything else is only upheld so long as it generates profit. If a company is forced by its patrons to change, they will change. (An example of this is the Flush Rush [Limbaugh] campaign, where people are taking their business elsewhere from companies that advertise on the Rush Limbaugh Show. Things have gotten bad enough for Rush that Clear Channel Communications issued an apology letter to its advertisers.)
But that sort of free association works both ways: numerous individuals and companies are boycotting the Boy Scouts here over its decision to allow gay scouts. Atheists are still not welcome though.
As the dubious Citizens United case pointed out, corporations here are allowed a certain personhood (and thus rights under the Constitution).
I, however, will only believe a corporation is a person when I see one executed in Texas.
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