[1013] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
re: Thank you for your comments
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Craig Partridge)
Tue Jul 16 02:41:44 1991
To: Roy Smith <roy@alanine.phri.nyu.edu>
Cc: com-priv@psi.com, edtjda@magic322.chron.com, nren-discuss@uu.psi.com
From: Craig Partridge <craig@sics.se>
Date: Tue, 16 Jul 91 08:38:18 +0200
> .... it's a waste of taxpayer's money to be shipping
> erotic stories and images around over the Internet.
Hmm, I was going to stay out of this topic, but let me add two cents from
my temporary station outside the US.
While pornography is an issue in the US, it is not an issue for many of the
other countries connected to the Internet. (Note as an aside this isn't
a matter of being "backward": we're talking about European countries with
very low crime rates, strong women's movements, high GNP). Pornography
is widely available in much of Europe and people see no trouble about
putting it on line (indeed, I know of folks who use the bitmaps in
their screensaver programs -- folks who work for European divisions of
US computer companies).
So an odd problem is that while one may not want pornography in the US
part of the Internet, the US-part of the Internet is connected to a number
of countries where having pornography on the network is both legally and
socially OK. It is going to be hard (and possibly counterproductive) to
try to stop US folks who want access to this material from accessing it
from abroad, even if one stomps out porn archives in the US. Welcome to
the global village.
>From this perspective, I think it is reasonable to ask whether it is worth
the taxpayer's money to worry about the problem.
Craig
PS: I should also note that there exist countries on the Internet with
more restrictive (and national, rather than local) laws about pornography
than those in the US. I believe Japan is one (I saw someone stopped trying
to bring in a Playboy at Narita airport).
