Most readers won’t be surprised to learn that two of the fastest
selling products on the Internet are pornography and gambling.
Advertisements for the latest on-line casino flood our mailboxes and
newsgroups, and it’s difficult to browse too far on the web without
finding a link the the latest "hot XX" site. The Internet is
not always a nice place.

The response of the community has been mixed. Parents are naturally
fearful of giving children unsupervised access to the Internet, for fear
of what they’ll come across. Politicians are looking for "happy
medium" solutions that satisfy the standards of the community, and
yet do not restrict the Internet to the point of being unusable.
Internet Service Providers are fearful of being made responsible for the
material that people access using their facilities.

Another issue is the distribution of material that is completely
illegal, no matter how old the viewer. Essentially, the problem seems to
be one of keeping the Internet as unrestricted as possible, to maximize
its potential, while ensuring that people are not given access to
material that they wouldn’t be allowed to access elsewhere.

Several possible solutions exist. The most obvious and heavy-handed
is legislative censorship: simply ban certain types of material. Of
course, this raises moral and ethical issues of censorship itself, but
there is another, more practical objection. The Internet spans the
world; to be effective, a legislative solution would have to be adopted
by every country with an Internet presence. Different countries have
different standards, and reaching a meaningful legal consensus on what
is and is not acceptable for the Internet is just not feasible.

The current solution is self-regulation, where the providers of
adult-oriented products and services work to restrict access to their
own material. There are several reasons why this is a better solution.
Firstly, the content providers themselves are relatively eager to
restrict access to their material, because it is in their own interests.
The vast majority of such sites are physically situated in the United
States, which has fairly strict laws governing the distribution of
pornographic material to minors. Prosecution under these laws is
relatively easy, if it can be demonstrated that access is unrestricted.

In practice, this sort of regulation seems to work fairly well,
using a membership scheme that requires a password to access restricted
material.

Another solution that is specifically oriented to parents is the use
of filtering programs that restrict access from the user’s end. Parents
can set up software such as "Net Nanny"
(http://www.netnanny.com/), and specifically set the sites that they
wish to allow their children to access. Any attempts to access sites not
on the "safe list" are simply blocked. This gives parents more
control over the material their children view, and perhaps more peace of
mind.

The Internet is not a safe place, in the same way that a knife is
not safe. A knife has to be sharp to be useful, and the Internet needs
to be relatively open and unrestricted to be useful. It is to be hoped
that a culture of responsible usage will grow in the Internet community,
to minimize the inherent dangers of such a powerful medium.

Review by: Igor Siemienowicz