likely to be contested and overthrown. Section 3 Even the most zealous censorship advocate would be blind not to realise that a world-wide censorship programme would be futile. National laws and community standards vary from nation to nation and even between regions of the same country. It would be virtually impossible to get every nation on earth to agree to a single censorship act. Thus, the Internet, in its entirety, can never truly be censored. Even if the politics of it could be appeased, there are too many sources of pornography. Even the most ambitious regulatory agency could not hope to control them all. So the question of how to keep pornography away from children still remains. Following the 1996 period of extensive controversy over pornography on the Internet, many sexually explicit websites introduced password protection schemes. Before being allowed access to the site a password is required. To obtain a password a user must subscribe to company such as “Adultcheck”. Online credit card payment is required before passwords are dispensed, the idea being that minors will not have access to credit cards. It seems like an attractive solution. Legislation could be used to compel the pornography industry to self-regulate itself in order to safeguard their substantial profits. There are two reasons however, why this would be an incomplete solution. Firstly, many websites would be out of the jurisdiction of the legislation and thus free to operate without password schemes. There would probably even be a significant number of renegade sites that would ignore legislation and get away with it. Secondly, many people simply give away their passwords on bulletin boards, which defeats the whole purpose of the scheme. The solution that parents and educators are currently turning to most is the censor software approach. Censor or filtering software works by denying access to “objectionable” websites on the Internet. Th...
