ISPs don't generally have to take down anything, at least not in the US.
Power companies and roads facilitate a whole lot. Zero legal responsibility there. You could make a pretty good argument that a road is responsible for quite a large proportional facilitation when drugs are bought.
Yes, but power companies and roads by and large facilitate legal activity, whereas sharing links to copyrighted content don't.
If you hypothetically ask me to make you a cup of coffee and it helps you stay awake so you can go commit a murder, I shouldn't be going to jail for that, unless my intent was to help you commit murder; and even then, I probably didn't help you very much.
On the other hand, if you come to me and ask me for the number of a local hitman, I should have a pretty good idea that I'm aiding and abetting in something illegal.
I think the problem there is more that you talked to me about finding hitmen, even if I didn't help.
If I merely let you access my directory of all the people in town sorted by job, there probably wouldn't be an issue.
A search engine is not a human. It can't be expected to preemptively filter out suspicious results. Google certainly doesn't.
In the end I just don't think it's right to shut down a site because of its userbase. We don't shut down roads when most of their traffic is criminals. And there's nothing inherently illegal about torrent search engines.
> We don't shut down roads when most of their traffic is criminals
Do you have an example of a road mostly used by criminals which the relevant authorities aren't trying to shut down? One where the criminals aren't actively bribing the authorities, obviously.
Power companies and roads facilitate a whole lot. Zero legal responsibility there. You could make a pretty good argument that a road is responsible for quite a large proportional facilitation when drugs are bought.