Towson State and other universities can be explained as a conformity with local legislation, shifting the responsibility for censorship to the state, which introduces various laws which limit what we can see and read or say and write. Censorship may be applied to material which governments judge as damaging to some or all of society (e.g., pornography) or to preserve state security. One of the Internet's most popular and visited sites is Yahoo, a huge index of Internet sites that 1.4 million people use per week as a reference center to guide them around the vast Internet. Yahoo tracks and categorizes about 50,000 different sites around the Internet, ranging from home pages of computer companies to on-line catalogs to news sources. 217 of those 50,000 sites are listed under the category of sex which is 0.4 percent of the total. Many of the sites under the heading relate to the discussion of health 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). Who should censor the Internet and how? Due to the lack of a controlling body and the Internet's anarchic nature, who could 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, like Towson State, 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 se...
