n of a solution. Censorship of Internet is a big issue and not much of it can be covered in an essay at this level. The essay deliberately focuses only on pornography. While many aspects had to be left out and others discussed minimally, the result of this essay remains a brief synopsis of relevant issues and conclusions on these issues. Section 1 In early 1995, a research team at the Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania released one of the most revealing studies into online pornography. The value of study, titled “Marketing Pornography on the Information Superhighway” is realised mainly due to its massive sample size. There are several issues about pornography on the Internet that were highlighted by the study. The research team surveyed 917,410 “sexually explicit pictures, descriptions, short stories and film clips”. Of special interest were Usenet newsgroups, which are basically electronic forums. It was found that 83.5 percent of the digitised images stored on these newsgroups were pornographic pictures. This finding indicates that there clearly is a substantial amount of pornography on the net. This however does not necessarily indicate that this material is easy to find. To come to a conclusion, this student conducted several experiments using the on-line “Altavista” search engine. The key searchword “sex” was entered. 616,156 links were returned. Out of the first 20 entries listed on the first page only 2 links were to pornographic sites. The search keyword “tits” however, returned 69,920 links. Out of the first 20 links listed on the first page 17 were to pornographic websites or bulletin boards. Amidst all these links was one that led to a French children’s pen-pal club called “Les P’tits Garnements. After reviewing the posted messages and photographs on one of the bulletin boards that showed up as a link, it was apparent that the pu...
