Internet Censorship 3
"Censorship - the act or policy of censoring. To censoring - to examine, control, delete or omit the content of." (Wordsmyth English Dictionary-Thesaurus, 1998) This is the official definition of the censorship, as people know it. It is important to concentrate on the "deleting" part, because in 1994, after the APRANET was turned off and the Internet became a public commercial network, people started to worry about decency of the World Wide Web. So, the U.S. Congress issued several bills (such as Internet Decency Act) that put strict laws into the place of controlling the Internet. In one of his interviews, senator Jim Exon, author of the Decency Act, quotes: "We must create laws for the Internet similar to those now in place for television and radio." (Exon, 1995) At the end of 1995, an opposition was formed. Citizens Internet Empowerment Coalition (branch of American Civil Liberties Union) declared that the Internet is not like any type of media and should not be censored as one. Watching this battle going, I formed a strong opinion. Joining the opposition, I believe that the Internet must not be censored because censoring is against basic human freedoms; it's impossible and unnecessary.
Taking a stand of the extreme opposition to the censorship on the Internet, I still can't deny the fact that the 'Net is full of x-rated material and in our society there is a group that is needed to be protected from it - children. It may seem that this is the case when we need the Internet to be censored. But we don't. That is my final point: censoring the Internet is absolutely unnecessary in order to protect minors from, so-called, indecent content. Firstly, there are tens of web sites such as Net-sitter, Net-Nanny, Adult-Check, Cyber-Patrol, etc. These companies are denying access to the x-rated pages to those of illegal age. The number of protective sites is growing and since they share their profit from advertisement with the companies that signed for their services, the numbers of x-rated sited joined is also growing. By the end of the century over 90 per cent of adult Internet entertainment will be closed for minors, without any censoring. Another thing that proves needlessness of the censorship is ability of parents to protect their children. Every web browser has Content Advisor were a user can make the list of unaccepted URLs (internet addresses) and lock it with a password. Most of the adult sites are listed in major search engines: Yahoo, Lycos, AOL and WebCrawler, so it should not take more that six hour to make a huge list of "indecent sites". Your browser then won't load them without your password. Easy. Of course, the fact that the censorship on the Internet is unconstitutional is not sufficient proof for some people. They are too frustrated with the explicit material that's on the 'Net. Well, here's something else: it is virtually impossible to censor the Internet. Why? First of all, because the Internet is global. Tens of millions people who are on-line today come from different cultures. Naturally, these cultures have different norms and m
Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1275
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page double spaced)
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