their pages they charge user to view Playboy and Hustler type material. What makes matters worse is evolution of the internet newsgroup system. USENET in its infancy was ARPANET's news and message component. Today USENET is a huge database with thousands of newsgroups that all internet users have access to. Millions use groups like alt.comp.disscussion.games to share ideas, and millions use groups like alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.teen to share ideas and pictures that are less family oriented. Average users can also set up homepages on ISP's. In fact, most packages ISP's offer usually include space for your own homepage. They are easy to create and the ISP's maintain them for free so the entire online community can see what you have to say. Unfortunately not everyone wants to set up homepages dealing with the spin rates of atoms or the airspeeds of South American swallows. Most ISP's are more than willing to set up homepages dealing with the most gratuitous of acts aimed at very specialized audiences. This is where the problem of net censorship arises. It is true that there is a wealth of pornography and other indecent material online for all to see. All that a person has to do is to type in an "indecent" word and modern search engines will point to sites where the word crops up. Typing in a popular for letter expletive into two of the most popular search engines yielded 17224 hits for Lycos and 40000 for AltaVista, the worlds biggest search engine. However both of these engines have over 60 million cataloged web pages. Although this material makes up less that 1% of all messages on USENET or pages on the world-wide-web, that is still a staggering number as there are millions of messages and web-pages on the internet. Most of this material is extremely hard to access as advanced knowledge of computers is required, however it is the youth in most families that know how to use the computer best. Problems arise when minors left alone on ...
