g to pass bills to prevent misuse of the Net. The Internet Censorship Bill of 1995, which has already been discuss earlier, was introduced to the U.S. Congress. Under the Censorship Bill, a person breaks the law if he/she puts a purity test on a web page without making sure children cannot access the page. Also, if a person verbally assaults someone on IRC, he/she breaks the law. If a university, where some students may be under 18 years old, carries the alt.sex.* newsgroups, which contains adult material, it breaks the law. According to George Melloan from the Wall Street Journal, a censorship bill was passed by the Senate 84-16 in July, and an anticensorship bill was passed by the House 420-4 in August. There are now four different sets of censorship and anticensorship language in the House and Senate versions of the Telecomm reform bill, which contradict each other and will have to be reconciled (Melloan, n.p.). In order to understand the need for the ever-growing body of legislation, it is important to explore the controversy, and the current problems involved with the Net as it exists must be introduced. The problem that concerns most people is offensive material such as pornography. As pointed out by Allison and Baxter, "Possible (offensive) topics are behavior (drugs, ... ), nudity, political/economic/social opinion, violence, racial/ethnic, religious, coarse language, sexual/gender orientation, [and] sexuality" (Allison and Baxter 3). Since the Internet is open to everyone, children are very easily exposed to such material. According to Allison and Baxter, "the information provided on the Internet, particularly through the WWW, ranges across train time-tables, university lecture notes, books, art exhibits, film promotions, the wisdom and ravings of individuals and, yes, pornographic pictures" (Allison and Baxter 3). Moreover, many high schools in the United States provide Internet access to students, which is very useful for loo...
