Irresistible force v. immovable object
THE question of pornography on the Internet is one that will be with us for a long time, and it will always be in the form of an irresistible force meeting an immovable object.
CompuServe's recent problems with the German authorities is only one skirmish in a never-ending battle.
This battle is between the pagans of the original Internet and the worried parents and conservatives who tell us that the world is no longer what it once was, that 'young people today show no respect' One of the problems with this whole subject is that nothing is the same for all people. One person's turn-on is another's pornography; one man's freedom is another's excess.
I understand both those who demand freedom of speech and those who do not want their children exposed to sexually explicit material. But the day will come, of course, when we can no longer protect our children and they will find out for themselves that there are people who enjoy doing rather curious things if other people are willing to let them. How they react to this may well depend on what we have taught them.
For those who are not confident in how they or the schools have taught their children, censorship will always be the answer.
Censorship makes us feel as if we are doing something when we are really hopeless at stopping it. Not only will the perverts and deviants find other ways of producing and disseminating what they want, we run the risk of making those we wish to protect far more curious about something they might not otherwise have had much interest in.
So, what is a poor innocent on-line service to do? For CompuServe the answer seems simple enough. Work is now going on to make it possible for various subscribing nations to be able, through software, to select certain newsgroups that they do not like and have them made 'inaccessible' to its citizens.
This will go some way to placating the conservatives but it will do nothing to change the problem. The Internet itself and all its pagan newsgroups are still available to those who have direct access to it. Preventing only those logging on through CompuServe will only push people away from CompuServe and on to other service providers.
The United States government is at the moment trying to work on something called the Decency in Cyberspace Act. But is there really a universally applicable definition of 'decency'?
