It feels like the longtermist believers got involved in this (those are the people obsessed with garage-engineered designer viruses who have a very tenuous grasp on how biology research actually works).
The inconvenience of possible mitigation strategies has no bearing on the existence of the risk itself.
On the one hand I could believe it's something more benign, or the usual misunderstood fear mongering making it to some political level (well make sure those users can't get online anonymously! being our current craze).
That said, chemistry and to some level physics have been the major domain of limited knowledge (chemistry because the average person could cause some damage, physics is more of a nation state issue generally).
However I do wonder if there's some legit data on "oh uh...looks like this thing you can make with easy to get and hard to regulate tools is dangerous" in the bio field. I know about the lab rats who want to just screw around in the garage, and it seems like that should be easy to hit at a supply level (much like how certain chemical compounds are just not available for civilians), but maybe there's something legit to limiting the data.
Not that this is a remotely good implementation of that. The hamfisted method does reek of some politician/bureaucrat just saying "No it can't ever return bio questions because RAR!" situation.
But where I live the glassware and precursors will get you a very angry knock on the door.
The ability for a handful of companies, simultaneously very powerful and easily susceptible to pressure from other powerful actors, to do the same sort of thing with the next generation of core learning and engineering tools, is freaking terrifying.
I’m not going to say you can’t find some of this information in shadier spots, but “how do I get my GPS to work on a rocket” or “what kind of math do I need for a fusion implosion” are some of the more extreme examples.
I believe there are several explosive compounds where the formula is decently guarded, although in that case tracking the materials is easier.
I’m not saying anything they’re doing is good, but I feel like since they’re just reinventing the search engine with a lot of this they’re running into similar barriers.
Google has been censoring shit at the whim of governments for years, remotely reasonable or not