Discuss the extent to which you feel censorship of material on the Internet is justifiable

p Censorship of material on the Internet

2007

Telecommunications , the transmission of information by wire , radio optic or infrared media , has been subject to its share of secrecy censorship and surveillance from its inception , but the emergence of the Internet signaled a telecommunications revolution that seemed to be free from the traditional forms of information control . The Internet is a system of linked computer networks , worldwide in scope , that greatly extends the reach of each participating system . Initially established by the U .S . Department of Defense in the early 1970s , the

Internet became a public fixture when thousands of corporate computer systems and commercial service providers joined the network . By the mid-1990s , the Internet was serving over twenty million users through two million host computers , and one million new users were being added each month Nowadays , internet is the fastest growing form of comunication and already a commoplace in the average American as well as European home .Wireless , bless communication and the uninterrupted flow of information have been promised to bring democracy , education , and culture to every corner of the world with a phone line . Nevettheless lately , there have occured numerous attempts to censor the Internet in to keep it clean ' However , if the Net is controlled regulated , restricted , in other words censored , it will undoubtedly have severe effects on its capabilities and potential

As the most recent of the media technologies , the Internet has the potential to combine all previous media in a personal , interactive form that could be virtually free from state or corporate censorship . It offers the promise of a truly democratic form of information exchange by combining the immediacy of telephone , the intimacy of mail , the graphics of television , and the social interaction of a community bulletin board But new forms of restraint on Internet communication have emerged particularly with respect to what are called computer bulletin board systems (BBSs

At the heart of the BBS is a central computer , set up and operated by the system operator (sysop . Users link their computers to the central computer , allowing them to communicate with other users , access databases , obtain software or perform a wide variety of other activities . The constitutional protection for these BBSs is still murky because it depends on whether the law regards the sysop as comparable to (1 ) a news publisher or editor (2 ) a secondary publisher , such as a library or bookstore (3 ) the broadcast media (4 ) a common carrier such as the telephone , or (5 ) a private real property owner

The ambiguity surrounding a sysop 's liability for a user 's action lies behind much of the self-censorship on the Internet . If a sysop has knowledge of a user 's actions and control over those actions , there is a greater likelihood of liability . Currently , there is a wide variety of levels of control over , and responsibility for , users ' messages Prodigy , one of the early commercial providers of Internet services claims to be responsible for its users ' messages , and therefore it claims the rights...