Criterion A Describing the Issue
As our society is becoming more and more dependent on the Internet, a constant debate on the content which is put on the web has aroused. The main debate is on whether the Internet should or should not be censored. Most people claim to be against censorship, but only with respect to those ideas that they agree with. The main concern for censoring the Internet is to prevent children from seeing forbidden content for their age. Advertisements for drugs, pornography and violence can easily be found by anyone. The web pages containing this type of content can have a bad influence on the way children will perceive the world later in life, argue the people which agree with censorship. However others argue that censorship would be a violation of freedom of speech and that it is the responsibility of the parents to guard their children while they are surfing on the web. “Banning whatever offends any group, will soon lead to no art, no culture, no humor, no satire" says Erica Jong in an article from the Information Age. Even though it is true that there are too many inappropriate topics on the Internet, it still remains the user’s choice whether he wants to access those sites.
Criterion B IT Background of the Issue
The first forms of what we know today as the Internet have originated during in 1969 during the Cold War into a system called ARPANET which stands for Advanced Research Projects Agency Network. This system was developed to keep countries and units in fast and easy contact. This was a key invention in the development of society as we know it now. Fulfilling its objective in 1990 ARPANET was disbanded, and it developed into an international network. The internet was a domain for researchers, academics, and government officials in its early years. Users needed to know cryptic commands and codes to be able to use the Internet. The World Wide Web (WWW) has led to the transformation of the internet to a multimedia environment, leading to web pages that could integrate not only text, but also images and sound. The World Wide Web is nowadays made-up of millions of interlinked web pages. To view this new environment that has been created web browsers have been developed. Web browsers are easy-to-use software programs that allow its users to explore the web by clicking on hot links. Since the Internet is still a premature development not enough laws have been imposed concerning the content which can be uploaded, another reason is that no one owns the Internet so it is hard to come up with an agreement between all the countries. The first steps that were taken against the censoring of the Internet began in February, 1995 when the “Internet Freedom and Family Empower Act” was introduced as an approach that would empower parents, rather than the State, to make decisions about what is considered decent in every household. In response to this many religious groups asked for a federal Decency Police that would shut down the immerging online communications industry by making online service providers criminally liable for the activities of their customers. A way to stop web pages with unwanted content is by using filter programs. A filter is a program that accepts a certain type of data and then outputs the transformed data.
