The increasing use of the personal computer and ready access to the Internet has been shadowed by a concern about the material that can be accessed in this fashion, and legislators have been considering ways to curtail and control the use of the Internet to reach and download materials considered objectionable, obscene, and pornographic. This concern has manifested itself especially in terms of the protection of children, though it is not clear how these materials can be kept from children and not adults when the Internet is largely anonymous.
The issue was discussed for some time before it came to national attention in a big way in 1995 when Senator James Exon, a Democrat from Nebraska, seemed to discover suddenly that pornographic pictures could be downloaded from the Internet and displayed on a home computer. What followed was a rush on the part of legislators to find a way to put a stop to what had been happening in some degree for many years with no official notice. Also in 1995, the publication of a study by Carnegie Mellon University added to the controversy with statistics many found frightening. This was an 18 month study that found 917,410 sexually explicit pictures, descriptions, short stories, and film clips on the Internet. On the Usenet groups where digitized pictures could be stored, 83.5 percent of the pictures were deemed pornographic. The study also found that trading in sexually explicit imagery is not one of the largest (if not the largest) recreational activities for users of computer networks. The images provided free were being used as a lure to sell other materials, and there were thousands of bulletin board (BBS) systems engaged in this practice. It was also found that 98.9 percent of the consumers of this material online were male. Of particular concern was the fact that this material did not merely consist of pictures of naked women but also involved pedophilia, and other deviant material inclu...