51% is necessary to create viable forks with arbitrary lengths. What that mining pool did was much less harmful: they just censored other parties' transactions during an ICO.

Unless a coordinated majority is censoring your transactions, you can't really be censored, your transactions will just be slightly delayed sometimes. Which is normally very harmless.

The only problem here was a poorly run ICO, where prices were dependent on the order of transactions. That wouldn't be the case with e.g. a reverse Dutch auction similar to the process for Treasury bills.