The problem with that is that most of the folks running those places have located their servers where it's hard to get them shut down. The concepts of sovereignty and international law throw up a lot of huge barriers. Spammers aren't located in places like Sierra Leone because it's a pleasant country to work in. They're there because they can bribe officials to keep them out of court, amongst other things.Why of course you could er just... prosecute the people running the website...
Child porn folks who are internal to the U.S., for example, are pretty easy to catch and destroy- just trying to set up such a website here without somebody catching you would be very difficult, and you'd have to go to pretty extreme lengths to hide the activity from your ISP or from investigators. People would still do it, but they'd get caught, and so would everybody in their little ring.
Catching all the people sharing that kind of sick shit over Usenet or various P2P is terrifically difficult, though, given the technological problems and legal issues involved.
And shutting down a dedicated website that might or might not be breaking local law, technically- say, a torrent tracker just for that kind of material- is probably well-nigh impossible, if it's located in the right place, and has the money to keep officials greased.
So, basically, I think that it's inevitable that we reach a breaking point on this. Between P2P piracy and economic damages, scammers, pornographers, illegal gambling, etc., it's a lot of stuff where just being reasonable and prosecuting offenders by contacting the country where the violation is occurring hasn't worked out very well.
I mean, the only real alternative is that Interpol is given a lot of teeth, and backed up by the Security Council, becoming a truly international police force and more or less redefining sovereignty. I can't see that one happening, folks.
