Gentlefolk,

I see two alternatives in this thread.

One is to allow the freedoms of today's internet to determine society's norms.

What cannot be stopped must therefore be assimilated, and although parents and school teachers and youth clubs may put filters and blocking programs on their computers, in general adult users of the net will be allowed to look at whatever they can find. A few people may, as a result, find that the sexual fantasies they have previously repressed are fuelled by what they see. Many others may be satisfied to look at faked images of violence and therefore never act out their imagined scenes.

The alternative is to replace today's network with a new one, one which can be effectively regulated.

It will be a network on which freedom of speech is guaranteed by law and treaty, not simply allowed because of technical decisions on network architecture made 30 years ago by a bunch of academics. We must not believe that the internet is immutable: we created it and we can change it. There is nothing essential about any aspect of the net, nothing that cannot be replaced, retooled or removed. If we don't like the fact that the net allows traffic to cross national borders without any controls, then we can build a new network that does allow monitoring. If we don't like the fact that e-mail headers can be forged, making untraceable spam possible, then we can build a mail system that forces authentication.

Changing a system used by several hundred million people around the world seems daunting. But in fact that has already happened - the World Wide Web is the child of the internet, and it will continue to change. The latest version of the TCP/IP protocol that underpins the net, IP version 6, is already being rolled out by ISPs. Eventually users will be asked to upgrade their local computers, and features like secure e-mail will become possible.

One part of the problem is that the net's standards are controlled by bodies like ICANN and the Web Consortium whose primary interest is technical stability and corporate interests. They deny that they are "political" organizations, where political is used in a derogatory sense rather than meaning "acting in the public interest". Before the internet can be made to reflect the public interest, it must be removed it from the hands of these groups, whose time, like that of the elves in Middle Earth, is over (sorry Sharni, but even Elrond would agree with me).

Of course, one consequence of giving control of the net to governments is that some governments are bad. I would rather see the network in the hands of governments who can be lobbied and replaced than leave it in the hands of the large corporations (Microsoft, Sun, IBM, Hewlett-Packard) who develop the programs or standards bodies which are indifferent to people's real interests.

As a culture we have decided that some sorts of imagery are unacceptable, and in democracies that line is usually drawn where most people feel comfortable. If you wish to see what your culture is like, look about your neighborhood. We allow images of consensual sex in our cinemas, but not images of bestiality or child abuse. Why should the net be any different? There is, of course the difficulty of incorporating the changing norms of one’s society.

I suspect that my position on issues of this nature is well known, but I thought I'd try to abstract the different positions. For those who are just now waking up, well, I hope the nap was refreshing.

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Eudaimonia