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 leniency in what is proper attire for a women in dress, or better put, undress. Do we adopt the standards of the French? We could discuss the standards of all nations of the world. That sounds like a huge undertaking for the entire planet to decide on one set of regulations for website content.
Let us also consider who is going to police the internet and actually capture the operators of porn sites. What country is going to fund the project. It would have to be a world wide agreement between the governments of every country for a realistic plan of action to work. Maybe that can be acheived. The leaders of every country meet somewhere and sign a declaration of enforcing an anti-porn limitation on the internet. I guess I could see that happening. Of course I also thought I'd see the cure for cancer by now. But to the point of enforcement, how will smaller third world countries that can't even control their own populations whose people are in civil war put forth the effort to stop the small group of people it would take to launch a porn site to the internet? And when they can't do it, who is supposed to jump in and fill their shoes? I'm sure there are people much more learned than I that have the know how to snuff out a site making it unviewable. Within two hours, with HTML saved to a hard drive, the same site returns with a different domain name and plenty of meta-tags to be found once again on a search engine. Granted they might have lost the paid costomers they had that subscribed to their site but that's of no worry. New costomers are surfing and will be found rather quickly.
The final outcome of ridding the internet of porn would be comparable to the war on drugs. Most of the time it would be the user that is busted for possession as the dealer is harder to capture. Every now and then the media will make hype of a large drug bust or the capture of some drug kingpin. That's all fine and well but for the ones busted there are thousands more lurking waiting to pick up the business of those that got shut down.
If authorities wanted the internet to be porn free there should have been some regulations put in place at the beginning. If you have a small fire and call the fire department it might only take one truck to put out the fire. If you wait until the fire is out of control before you call, there might not be enough left to save with all of the trucks available. That's what the porn industry is on the internet. Out of control and only so many fire trucks that will come to the rescue.