ng transmitted to the screens of computers being operated by children. Computer networks have special qualities of their own that are not captured by analogy to any other medium. In some respects, network exchanges resemble the sorts of exchanges people might have with one another in face-to-face meetings. Conversations among strangers in chat rooms are completely unlike the traditional point-to-point communication in a telephone call. Where one would be unlikely to converse with a total stranger for no particular reason, and much more like the casual mingling that one would see in a real-life social gathering. This new censorship law marks an extraordinary extension of "decency" regulation to casual encounters. "Anything as massive as the global system of interconnected networks that is the Internet can not be 'regulated' in any meaningful manner. The very nature of the Internet precludes its effective regulation. It was designed to be a self-healing network of diverse platforms capable of operating under the most adverse of conditions - nuclear holocaust." (Albert Gidari) Creating an effective roadblock on the "Information Super-highway" is technically difficult and practically impossible. ISPs (Internet Service Providers) cannot easily prevent the flow of information due to the enormous quantity of network traffic and hundreds of different protocols by which it is transferred. News items the equivalent to the storage space of thirteen CD-ROMs is posted to the Newsgroups every ten days, 37 megabytes per minute. It is technically difficult, expensive in both computer-time and cost, and inaccurate for an ISP to attempt to censor the content of Newsgroups, unless they block access to particular newsgroups completely. Studies show Internet pornography only represents a small portion of Internet traffic. Less than one percent (Lloyd). Getting pornography is quite effortless. Basically the only thing one needs to do is select any of the sea...
