People shouldn't try to learn about martial arts from kung fu movies, and shouldn't try to learn about sex from porn.
Of course, this filter will also try to block you if you're trying to learn about hacking, or seeking anonymous advice about self-harming. Don't fall into the trap of thinking this is just a porn thing.
http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21117979#
Its unfortunate so many people here are mixed up about first amendment, liberty and ease of watching Porn. I will not hold that against you, few years ago, I was you.
And not all porn is like the porn you're describing. Erotic literature and comics are quite popular with the younger generations, which manage to depict outlandish fantasies and fairly normal sex within caring relationships with surprisingly similar frequency. Not to mention, if you consider things like crossdressing and transexual porn, one person's kink can be another's lifeline. To censor all porn, apart from being reprehensible on the grounds of freedom of speech, is throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
As for 4 year olds, I actually don't think they need to be worried about. I grew up with the internet, so naturally I stumbled across porn a few times before I hit puberty. I remember being quite surprised at first, but I got over it pretty quickly. I said "gross," clicked back, went back to surfing the web and playing video games, and never really thought about it or sought it out again until the hormones kicked in. Of course that's an anecdote, but I think finding porn as a kid is about as inconsequential as walking in on your parents having sex.
What people should be fucking terrified about is the popularity of camera and GPS-equipped smartphones that your naive kid can use to post geotagged selfies up for the entire world to see, making it trivial for predators to stalk them. But few parents are aware of the danger of this, and a firewall wouldn't help it anyway.
I'd also like to see some properly collated evidence.
government IS NOT your childs caretaker
First, there a major difference between restrictions placed on convicted criminals, and restrictions placed on every citizen of an entire country.
Second, one represents a danger to the physical safety of others, and the other represents something that you would prefer your child not to see - do you not see a stark difference between a child being kidnapped and raped, and a child accidentally clicking onto a pornographic website?
Its not that complicated - we punish those who have committed crimes, we do not do so preemptively to entire populations.