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Internet Regulation In Ian Milligan's A Haven For Perverts

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In today’s Canadian society, we often take for granted just how fortunate we are to be able to use one of the most important aspects of modern life: the internet. However, the current state of a free and unregulated internet was not always guaranteed, as there was tremendous support for government regulation of the medium during the 1990’s. Ian Milligan’s article “A Haven for Perverts, Criminals, and Goons”: Children and the Battle for and Against Canadian Internet Regulation, 1991-1999 traces both sides of the debate, from their origins all the way until the CRTC’s decisive ruling in May 1999. The roots of the debate, as Milligan believes at least, can be traced to a TIME exposé in July of 1995, where the article cover of a boy stunned by images of cyberporn on his computer, set the tone for a debate that would last for years. While it would later be revealed that both this article, as well as others, were fundamentally flawed, they were still quite effective when it came to making parents panic about what their children might see over the internet. And, this brings us to what Milligan offers as the defining moment for the pro-regulation campaign: parents vying to protect their children. However, not everyone shared their interests, as the counter-argument also had a substantial following amongst technologically savvy …show more content…

They also strongly feared that Canada could fall behind competitors both in terms of competitiveness as well as high paying jobs if we didn’t do a good enough job of building up our internet infrastructure. The federal government’s response to this was the construction of SchoolNet in 1993, an initiative to increase children’s overall education, in addition to helping our youth become more competitive in the future. This means that children were now growing up on the internet, and playing directly into the fears of most

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