tent The previous fact leads to two related issues. First, there is no overall set of standards to apply to the quality of material available over the Internet, quality meaning factors like accuracy, currency, editing and updating policies. Right now quality control is only exercised by the people who make the documents and because of that the standards are sometimes low. There is also a problem of currency and revision as well as the accuracy of the original material and the most common complaint that out-of-date items are being re-found, sometimes after several years (Cockerill, 1994). Secondly, the anarchic nature means that there is little or no control over the content of documents posted over the Internet. National governments may try to apply legislation but it is very difficult to prevent a range of potentially offensive material from being distributed once that material has already been disseminated. Not only that but the USA could be protected by the First Amendment. Also, the offense usually is one of possession of material so once the material is distributed over the Internet it is out of the hands of the main offender. The Internet is international and it is not possible to stop material at the border in the same way that books and magazines can be stopped, therefore, it is left up to individual organizations like Carnegie Mellon. This is an example of how technical developments have overtaken the ability of the national governments to control the dissemination of information on a national scale. It is not certain whether legislation applying to, for example, obscene publications, can be applied to digitized material because the question that is asked is whether or not it is published. What may be legal in one country is illegal in another: German law prohibits claims that the Holocaust did not happen, but this does not stop white supremacists from the US or another country from transmitting this claim to their sympathizers...
