Sex on the Net is the biggest underground business in the world. It attracts tens of millions of users. Online pornography was the first consistently successful e-commerce product and contributed greatly to the Internet's explosive growth. These adult sites gave us technological advances in advertising, user tracking, and e-commerce that have now spread throughout the Web.

But because of societal disapproval and fear of legal prosecution, the porn industry on the Internet remains largely underground. Mainstream analysts hardly comment on it, and accurate statistics are extremely hard to come by (for instance, estimates range from 20,000 to 7 million active X-rated sites on the Net). Besides societal disapproval of obscenity there are also issues such as child porn, and illegal photographs circulatin

Our government makes technologically particularistic laws, basing regulations on individual technologies. "Consequently, telephone regulation is fundamentally different from broadcast regulation, which is fundamentally different from cable regulation, which is likely to be fundamentally different from Internet regulation." (Napoli 1997;Werbach 1997) The government has the power to regulate U.S sites, but internet sites from around the world are available to any U.S internet user. If the United States government bans obscene sites from our nation's sites, the $1 billion underground industry will just circulate into someone else's economy. The best our government can do is have the U.S. congressional Commission on Online Child Protection call for parents to monitor their children's time online and for the adult industry and Internet service providers (ISPs) to voluntarily take steps to protect minors from online porn and sexual exploitation - which they did. Our government seems favorable towards this industry and regulations banning porn sites don't seem feasible in our near future.

For frantic parents who need to keep their children off sites like these, filtering software in many forms is available for purchase. However, the committee of the Child Online Protection Act of 1998 (COPA), concluded that the "child-protective technologies and methods evaluated by the Commission provide an important but incomplete measure of protection from 'harmful to minors' material online." (E-commerce times.com) For instance, i

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Approximate Word count = 1026
Approximate Pages = 4 (250 words per page double spaced)