by Scott Allison

Created on: December 05, 2008   Last Updated: January 23, 2009

Ridding the Internet of porn: Is it a realistic objective? Sure, just as realistic as ridding the streets of this country of drugs and underage drinking. The World Wide Web is huge, well beyond the imagination since it's inception. Add to that the ease of access to anyone with a computer and a phone line. Web hosting has become a very large business on the internet. Are they to be responsible for what a client posts online? Maybe, but whose guidelines will they have to use? If a client from say, Nigeria knows HTML enough to design a porn site and posts it to the internet, who's supposed to shut it down? The powers that be now can't even keep Nigerian scams from running rampant on Ebay and other auction sites. I'm sure everyone's seen one of those scams, they send you a check for a large amount of money, you cash the check and keep a portion of it and send the remainder back to the scammer. In the end, the casher of the check gets a phone call from their bank stating the check was bogus and, oddly enough, the bank wants their money back.

Next, there is the issue of cencorship and freedom of speech. The internet has taken great steps to rid the online world of child porn. Unfortunately, as soon as they shut one down another pops up. Tracking the operators of these sites is time consuming and expensive and sooner or later the authorities catch people in the child porn industry. Most of the time it's usually someone viewing it and not the operator of the site. Tracking those people is more difficult taking into consideration how far a site passes through computer components before it hits the internet. Please don't misunderstand me, I'm not defending these people, merely stating the reality of catching the perpetrators and bringing them to justice. The legal standards for online porn, 18 and older to show nudity, will be challenged fiercly by operators of "legal" sites as there is a huge amount of money that trades hands in the business. They will claim a violation of their rights to be put out of business.

My next question is whose standards are to be used to govern what is porn and not porn? Every country has different laws and regulations. The internet is almost like the old west in that every town had a sherriff that had to control a large population with himself, a deputy and a six shooter. Problem was every sherriff in every town had their own ideals about how he wanted his town run. Apply those standards to the internet. France is somewhat famous for it's

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