sation on IRC. Two people could be talking to one another, but all that they seeis text. It would be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to know for certain the genderand/or age just from communication like this. Then if the conversationalist lies about anypoints mentioned above it would be extremely difficult to know or prove otherwise. Inthis way governments could not restrict access to certain sites on the basis of ages. Athirteen year old boy in British Columbia could decide that he wanted to downloadpornography from an adult site in the U.S. The sire may have warnings and agerestrictions but they have no way of stopping him from receiving their material if he sayshe is 19 years old when prompted. The complexity in the way information is passedaround the Internet means that if information has been posted, deleting this materialbecomes almost impossible. The millions of people that participate on the Interneteveryday have access to almost all of the data present. As well it becomes easy to copysomething that exists no the Internet with only a click of a button. The relative ease ofcopying data means the second information is posted to the Internet it may be archivedsomewhere else. There are in fact many sites on the Internet that are devoted to thearchiving of information including: Walnut Creek's cdrom.com, which archives anincredible amount of software among others, The Internet Archive-www.archive.org,which is working towards archiving as much of the WWW as possible, and TheWashington University Data Archive, Which is dedicated towards archiving software,publications, and many other types of data. It becomes hard to censor material that mightbe duplicated or triplicated within a matter of minutes.The Internet is much too complex of a network for censorship to effectively occur. It is a totally new and unique environment in which communications take place. Existinglaws are not applicable to this medium. The lack of...
