The world-wide web (WWW), which is another component of the Net, can be used
to publish material that would traditionally appear in journals, magazines,
posters, books, television and even on film. The term UNIX, a widely heard
computer term, is a multi-user, multitasking operating system originally
developed by Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie, at AT&T Bell Laboratories, in 1969
for use on minicomputers (UNIX n.p.). To understand the background of the
controversy, it is also necessary to give a brief history on the Internet. The
Internet was created about twenty years ago in an attempt to connect a U.S.
Defense Department network called the ARPAnet and various other radio and
satellite networks. The ARPAnet was an experimental network designed to support
military research; in particular, research about how to build networks that
could withstand partial outages (such as bomb attacks) and still function. At
about the same time the Internet was coming into being, Ethernet local area
networks (LANs) were developed. Most of these workstations came with Berkeley
UNIX, which included IP (Internet Protocol) networking software. This created a
new demand: rather than connecting to a single large timesharing computer per
site, organizations wanted to connect the ARPAnet to their entire local network.
The demand keeps growing today. Now that most four-year colleges are connected
to the Net, people are trying to get secondary and primary schools connected.
People who have graduated from college where they have used the resources of the
Net in classes, know what the Internet is good for, and talk their employers
into connecting different corporations. All this activity points to continued
growth, networking problems to solve, evolving technologies, and job security
for networkers (Willmott 107). The Internet can also be compared to a church. In
many ways the Internet is like a church: it has its council of elders, every
member has an opinion about how things should work, and they can either take
part or not. It's the choice of the user. The Internet has no president, chief
operating officer, or Pope. The constituent networks may have presidents and
CEO's, but that's a different issue; there is no single authority figure for the
Internet as a whole.
As stated by Frances Hentoff, the staff writer for The Village Voice and the
author of First Freedoms, on an info superhighway driven by individuals, there
are no cops preventing users from downloading (Hentoff 1). Internet users can
broadcast or express anything they want. The fact that the Net has no single
authority figure sets forth a problem about what kind of materials could be
available on the Net. The U.S. government is now trying to pass bills to prevent
misuse of the Net. The Internet Censorship Bill of 1995, which has already been
discuss earlier, was introduced to the U.S. Congress. Under the Censorship Bill,
a person breaks the law if he/she puts a purity test on a web page without
making sure children cannot access the page. Also, if a person verbally assaults
someone on IRC, he/she breaks the law. If a university, where some students may
be under 18 years old, carries the alt.sex.* newsgroups, which contains adult
material, it breaks the law. According to George Melloan from the Wall Street
Journal, a censorship bill was passed by the Senate 84-16 in July, and an
anticensorship bill was passed by the House 420-4 in August. There are now four
different sets of censorship and anticensorship language in the House and Senate
versions of the Telecomm reform bill, which contradict each other and will have
to be reconciled (Melloan, n.p.). In order to understand the need for the
ever-growing body of legislation, it is important to explore the controversy,
and the current problems involved with the Net as it exists must be introduced.
The problem that concerns most people is offensive material such as pornography.
As pointed out by Allison and Baxter, Possible (offensive) topics are behavior
(drugs, ... ), nudity, political/economic/social opinion, violence,
racial/ethnic, religious, coarse language, sexual/gender orientation, [and]
sexuality (Allison and Baxter 3). Since the Internet is open to everyone,
children are very easily exposed to such material. According to Allison and
Baxter, the information provided on the Internet, particularly through the WWW,
ranges across train time-tables, university lecture notes, books, art exhibits,
film promotions, the wisdom and ravings of individuals and, yes, pornographic
pictures (Allison and Baxter 3). Moreover, many high schools in the United
States provide Internet access to students, which is very useful for looking up
information, but if a student intends to look for inappropriate material, he/she
is very likely to find such material simply by doing an Internet search. Another
crucial Internet crime is the theft of credit card numbers. Companies do
business on the Net, and credit card numbers are stored on their servers;
everyone with the necessary computer knowledge could hack in and obtain such
databases for illegal purposes.
