alth issues. Many others are commercial sites like Playboy, Penthouse and Hustler magazines. Yahoo's co-founder acknowledges that the sites his index tracks are a fraction of the "millions" of places people can travel on the Internet but he said it is a good representative sample (O'Conner, 1995). Due to the lack of a controlling body and the Internet's anarchic nature, could any one person act as a censor of the material stored and distributed over the Internet? This is an extremely important issue because the censor or censors would have an enormous amount of power. Right now, it is unlikely that any group exists that could take this role and, it is most likely going to fall on individual organizations to limit what can be received, as in the alt.* groups. Also, who could be held responsible for what is distributed over the various sections of the Internet, there are many divisions, such as: private email, public databases and bulletin boards, plus sites maintained in both the public and private sector. Is the moderator of an email discussion list to be held responsible for the contributions of subscribers? The President of the Internet Society has indicated that the ISOC has drafted guidelines for behavior on the net but this will probably not deter anti-Semitic and racist groups because it is a form of free speech. As the Internet becomes even more commercial there will probably be less forms of offensive material because these large corporations will censor anything that may offend. Material from the Internet is difficult to control because of the nature of the net. It is largely for this reason that governments will have to fall back on legislation over possession, rather than distribution. The only probable solution, right now, is for organizations to license sites and then have the servers use their power to exert control over the content or the space and then licenses would be withdrawn as a means of punishment or cen...
