Censorship On The Internet Essay

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Censorship on the Internet

Censorship is a word that breeds strong emotions in many people. Whether they are opponents or proponents. Censorship has been around since before the time of the bible. It has produced wars and revolutions. During the time of the Romans censorship was not a problem and they came up with many different types of inventions that during the dark ages were lost and invented again. Not all of this was due to censorship but it was a factor. Much of the knowledge of the Romans would have been completely lost if it were not for munks who's only job was to copy books. Censorship has always been a staple of Dictatorships and Toleration leaderships. Censorship is great when wanting to take over a nation and put restraints on it. Media has always been the link between government and the people, and if you control that outlet then you have a chance of making people think the way you want them to. These are some of the dangers of censorship.

The Internet is a wonderful place of entertainment and education, but like all places used by millions of people, it has some murky corners people would prefer children not to explore. In the physical world, society as a whole wants to protect children, but there are no social or physical constraints to Internet surfing. With the passage of the 1996 Telecommunications Act, the American Congress has prepared to turn the Internet from one of the greatest resources of cultural, social, and scientific information into the online equivalent of a children's reading room. By invoking the overboard and vague term "indecent" as the standard by which electronic communication should be censored, Congress has insured that information providers seeking to avoid criminal prosecution will close the gates on anything but the most tame information and discussions. The Internet Censorship Bill of 1995, also known as the Exon/Coats Communications Decency Act, would make it a criminal offense to make available to children anything that is indecent, or to send anything indecent with "intent to annoy, abuse, threaten, or harass"1. The goal of this bill is to try to make all public discourse on the Internet suitable for young children. The Communications Decency Act calls for two years of jail time for anyone caught using "indecent" language over the net; as if reading profanities online affects us more dramatically than reading them on paper. Also, a person breaks the law if he/she puts a purity test on a web page without making sure children cannot access the page. In addition, if a person verbally assaults someone, 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 2.

It is not necessary for the government to patrol fruitlessly on the Internet when parents can simply install software like Net Nanny or Surf Watch. These programs block all "sensitive" material from entering one's modem line. What's more, legislators have already passed effective laws against obscenity and child pornography. There is no need for a redundant Act to accomplish what has already been written. Over 17 million Web pages float throughout cyberspace. Never before has information been so instant, and so global. Never before has the government been so spooked by the potential power "little people" have at their fingertips. The ability for anyone to send pictures and words cheaply and quickly to potentially millions of others seems to terrify the government and control freaks. The American First Amendment states, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof, or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press...."3. The Act takes away this right. The issue of whether is it necessary to have censorship on the Internet is being argued all over the world. Censorship would damage the atmosphere of the freedom to express ideas on the Internet; therefore, government should not encourage censorship. The Internet was originally a place for people to freely express their ideas worldwide. It is also one of the world's most valuable types of technology. Ordinary people use the Net for communication, expressing their opinions, or obtaining up-to-date information from the World Wide Web (WWW). The Internet can 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 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"4. 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.

As far as online censorship there are some things that are of questionable or just plain bad taste that some people feel should be illegal....

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