In my opinion, the Internet doesn't need increased censorship. What it does need is increased enforcement. There are plenty of laws already in existence to protect children from being exposed to such an unsavory arena of personal interaction, no matter how much they might want to be exposed. The problem is enforcement of those laws.

You have to show ID to get everything else that is restricted to certain ages, whether it's the senior discount at the movies or a beer in a bar, but to get access to pornography all you need to do is assert you're over eighteen, or twenty one in some jurisdictions. Personally, I don't even know what the limit is in my state.

As we currently can't or don't manage to enforce the laws we have, enforcing more laws, more censorship seems unlikely to be successful. Even if the United States chose to ban domestic production of pornography, it is unlikely the rest of the world would and without creating a massive agency to selectively block all pornography we would cut ourselves off from the rest of the world. Not good business sense. Not good political sense. Not good common sense. Simply, not good.

More generally, I wouldn't mind seeing greater enforcement of extant laws. I definitely wouldn't mind having some way to stop the constant ads for penis enlargement. I'm quite content the way I am, thank you very much.

Learn more about this author, Evan Carden.
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