Some thirty years ago the RAND corporation, Americas first and foremost Cold War think-tank faced a strange strategic problem. The cold war had spawned technologies that allowed countries with nuclear capability to target multiple cities with one missile fired from the other side of the world. Post-nuclear America would need a command and control network, linked from city to city, state to state and base to base. No matter how thoroughly that network was armored or protected, its switches and wiring would always be vulnerable to the impact of atomic bombs. A nuclear bombardment would reduce any

In 1984 the National Science Foundation got into the act, and the new NSFNET set a blistering pace for technical advancement, linking newer, faster, shinier supercomputers through thicker, faster links. ARPANET formally expired in 1989, a victim of its own success, but its users scarcely noticed as ARPANET's functions not only continued but improved. In 1971 only four nodes existed, today tens of thousands of nodes make up the network and 35 million of users make up the internet community.

Rimm has developed his own credibility problems. When interviewed by Time for the cover story, he refused to answer questions about his life on the grounds that it would shift attention away from his findings. But quite a bit of detail has emerged, much of it gathered by computer users on the Internet.

This is where the problem of net censorship arises. It is true that there is a wealth of pornography and other indecent material online for all to see. All that a person has to do is to type in an "indecent" word and modern search engines will point to sites where the word crops up. Typing in a popular for letter expletive into two of the most popular search engines yielded 17224 hits for Lycos and 40000 for AltaVista, the worlds biggest search engine. However both of these engines have over 60 million cataloged web pages. Although this material makes up less that 1% of all messages on USENET or pages on the world-wide-web, that is still a staggering number as there are millions of messages and web-pages on the internet.

The internet is and institution that resists institutionalization. The internet community, belonging to everyone yet no-one, resembles our own community in many ways, and is susceptible to many of the same pressures. Business people want the internet put on sounder financial footing. Government people want the Internet more fully regulated. Academics want it dedicated exclusively to scholarly research. Military people want it spyproof and secure. All these sources of conflict remain in a stumbling balance and so far the internet remains in a thrivingly anarchial condition. This however is a mixed blessing.

the question of whether free speech on the Internet should be sharply curtailed, as some Senators and Member of Congress have proposed. But the "flame war" that ensued on the computer networks when the story was published soon gave way to a full-blown and highly political conflagration.

The main focus of discontent was a new study, "Marketing Pornography on the Information Superhighway", purportedly by a team of researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, which was a centerpiece of Time's story. In the course of the debate, serious questions have been raised regarding the study's methodology, the ethics by which its data were gathered and even its true authorship.

Some common words found in the essay are:
Post-nuclear America, South American, Carnegie Mellon, Science Foundation, Playboy Hustler, Thanks APRANET, United Code, Censoring Internet, Service Providers, Decency Act, carnegie mellon, nodes network, information superhighway, cover story, set homepages, internet community, rimm study, set homepages dealing, search engines, cold war, material makes, communications decency act, spin rates atoms,
Approximate Word count = 2477
Approximate Pages = 10 (250 words per page double spaced)