Internet Censorship
The Internet is a wonderful place of entertainment and education, but like all places used by millions of people, it has some murky corners people would prefer children not to explore. In the physical world, society as a whole wants to protect children, but there are no social or physical constraints to Internet surfing. The Internet Censorship Bill of 1995, also known as the Exon/Coats Communications Decency Act, has been introduced in the U.S. Congress. It would make it a criminal offense to make available to children anything that is indecent, or to send anything indecent with "intent to annoy, abuse, threaten, or harass" ("Stop the Communications ..." n.p.). The goal of this bill is to try to make all public discourse on the Internet suitable for young children. The issue of whether is it necessary to have censorship on the Internet is being argued all over the world. Censorship would damage the atmosphere of the freedom to express ideas on the Internet; therefore, government should not encourage censorship. The Internet was originally a place for people to freely express their ideas worldwide. It is also one of America's most valuable types of technology. Ordinary people use the Net for communication, e
Many experts have pointed out that government censorship is not possible. 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. It's becoming technically and politically impossible" (Rheingold n. The Internet can be compared to a church. The networks may have presidents and CEO's, but that's a different issue; there is no single authority figure for the Internet as a whole. Howard Rheingold, the editor of the Whole World Review, observes that, "the 'censor the Net' approach is not just morally misguided. Corn-Revere, an expert on Internet censorship at the Howgan & Harson Law Firm, points out that "the purpose of indecency regulation is to keep adult material from falling into the hands of kids. 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. In many ways the Internet is like a church: it has its council of elders, every member has an opinion about how things should work, and they can either take part or not. In addition, Meleedy, a computer science graduate student at Harvard University, said that if "the Internet makes democracy this accessible to the average citizen, is it any wonder Congress wants to censor it?" (Meleedy 1). First, it is not fair to exclude the freedom and damage the atmosphere of freely expressing ideas just for the safety of children. As predicted by Corn-Revere, "At the very least, the law will force content providers to make access more difficult, which will affect all users, not just the young" (Corn-Revere 70). xpressing their opinions, or obtaining up-to-date information from the World Wide Web (WWW).
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Acceptance Essays
