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The Urgent Need for Internet Censorship Essay

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The Urgent Need for Internet Censorship

With the increasing popularity of the Internet, especially among children, parents and others have been concerned that young people have easy access to a wide range of pornography available online. They have pointed out that it is a relatively easy maneuver for children to call up salacious material at home or in libraries--simply by searching for key words like "porn" or "sex." The purpose of this paper is to amplify on this subject of the need for regulation of the Internet.

In February of 1996 Congress passed--and the president signed--the Communications Decency Act, which made it a crime to transmit "indecent" material to minors on line(Communications). But the Supreme Court,
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This is a sample of the new filtering technology parents can use to block access to sites children may visit. The internet industry is establishing a public service campaign to inform parents about the danger of pornography online; and creating a national hotline to report incidents of cyber porn.

Ultimately, the only real solution is parental empowerment and parental education, so, therefore, a legislative solution may not create the kind of comfort that people seek and actually could, inadvertently, do some damage to dealing with the problem in a substantive kind of way. But some critics don't believe that voluntary industry efforts will be effective. Republican Senator Dan Coats of Indiana introduced a bill requiring all commercial web sites carrying material harmful to minors to block access or face criminal penalties. This bill rovided very stiff fines. The Communications Decency Act would have sent a very strong signal to the internet providers that if you get caught, if you do this and you get caught, it's not going to be, oh, well, we're sorry, we won't do it again; there's going to be a very stiff penalty, including a jail sentence. But it did not pass into law. Any new law restricting Internet access--like the Communications Decency Act before it--is certain to be challenged in court.

Industry believes the solution to this problem of easy access to salacious materials is to give parents the tools to block children from
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