According to section 1 of the Obscene Publications Act 1959, something is obscene if it's "likely to corrupt or deprave" those who come into contact with it. According to the tabloid newspapers, the Internet is full to bursting with such material. This view, while not presenting a totally accurate picture, does have some basis in fact.
It's true, there is pornographic material available from the Internet. The majority of this is, however, of the same variety found in magazines that can be readily bought from any High Street newsagent. Indeed, both Penthouse and Playboy magazines now have on-line versions accessible through the World Wide Web. The Penthouse site, in fact, broke all Internet records with more than 800,000 accesses on its opening day. The pictures are generally scanned directly out of those magazines and aren't of a very high photographic quality. Given that even with a fast modem each picture will take a few minutes to download, then with a local rate connection to the Internet and account charges taken into consideration, the cost of getting hold of just a handful of pictures will be far in excess of the cover price of the complete magazine in the first place.
A popular on-line discussion system called Usenet can be accessed once you have an Internet account. It consists of 15,000 or so separate discussion forums, known as newsgroups, covering every conceivable topic. There are newsgroups about computer operating systems, politics, sports, music, and so on. However, a quick look through the list of subjects will reveal a number of forums that exist solely to distribute pornographic images and text. Such names as alt.sex. or alt.binaries.pictures.erotica might not sound too worrying, but how about alt.sex.necrophilia, alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.bestiality, alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.tasteless, or alt.binaries.pictures. erotica.children?
Viewing pornography has literally become child's play, at least as far as the media's concerned. But let's look at the facts. Most Internet service providers require account payments to be made by credit card, but credit cards are pretty hard to come by if you're a child. And yet we know that lots of children do have Internet access; a survey carried out by the BBC for its recent Radio 1 Interactive Night programme showed that 30 per cent of the people who responded to the on-line questionnaire were between the ages of 11 and 15. This, one can only assume, means that parents are allowing their children to access the Internet using their accounts. Surely the issue of parental control, at least, enters the field of play?
Section 43(1) of the Broadcasting Act makes it an offence to send by public telecommunications "material which is grossly offensive or of an indecent, obscene or menacing character". What this means in plain English is that it's illegal to distribute such material, and the majority of the postings to the Usenet newsgroups mentioned above most certainly fall into this category.
This has prompted many Internet service providers (including the BBCNC and Delphi) to filter the newsgroups that they provide to their members. Some say this is done on purely moral grounds, but it's much more likely to be a case of better safe than sorry, with the service providers warding off any possible chance of being prosecuted.
There's increasing pressure being placed on governments, both here and overseas, to do something about the Internet. In the US, there's the worrying Communications Decency Act proposal, and in the UK it was reported recently that John Major had written to Mary Whitehouse to inform her that a committee was being set up to review the Obscene Publications Act with regard to computer pornography. You may ask why this should be worrying at all; surely if something is illegal it should be treated as such no matter what the method of distribution?
Well, yes, but the problem is that the people who are so actively trying to control the Internet know little about it; most opinions seem to be based on very little actual Internet experience. The danger is that legislation causes widespread changes to the way information can be exchanged, fundamentally alters the way that Internet service providers can operate, and restricts legitimate use while not actually preventing the very cause of the legislation in the first place. The Communications Decency Act currently being debated in the US is a prime example of this.
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