Internet law on explicit material
The most popular content on the Web and the Internet was, is and probably will always be of pornographic nature. When the Internet was just released to the public, the first businesses were dial-up bulletin boards offering pornographic content for serious money. Some of the material available was not even that much explicit.
Nowadays it is believed that at least two thirds of all Internet content is pornographic, with a good portion of that material available for free. The legislative body and the Internet community agreed that such content is hugely popular and cannot be banned from the Net. For that reason laws were passed where anyone posting explicit material on the Web has to make sure that no minors can gain access to the material. Plenty of commercial web sites are following the regulations to the letter. But there are still rogue sites offering porn to anybody who has unrestricted access to the net.
Such sites mainly exist in form of community forums, where a perfunctory age check has been implemented. Once the porn enthusiast has verified his age by clicking on a button he gains unrestricted access to explicit material.
Other web sites have organized an adult check system involving credit cards, but this became very unpopular when unsolicited charges appeared on the bill.
Law makers are very strict with this policy in protecting minors, many web sites which were taken down and owners charged with corruption of minors, where access by minors could be established, were prosecuted. Illegal porn sites offering copyrighted material are available very freely; anyone who is savvy enough to remove the Google image filter can get access to plenty of material in seconds.
The problem again seems to lie in the jurisdiction. When a web site hosting illicit content is out of reach for the authorities, then there is no way to stop them from distributing it. Some smart web host providers have found ways to provide hosting for people looking to share illegal content over the Net by putting servers in countries and places outside of the reach of regular law enforcement. There is a host, who shall remain unnamed, who purchased an abandoned oil rig in the Atlantic Ocean and installed serious bandwidth leading to and from the rig, with the sole intention to provide hosting for web sites that cannot get hosting with regular providers, for whatever reason. His prices are just a tad higher, but not extremely so, and since that he is outside of the jurisdiction of any country, he cannot be barred from his activities.

Social Bookmarking
This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 15th, 2009 at 4:23 pm and is filed under internet. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
















July 16th, 2009 at 9:54 am
I really don’t see a real way for the regulations to be enforced. First, many sites are outside the countries where the regulations are in place. Second, having a button in the home page that basically says “I am over 18 years old” is not going to work.
Of course, websites do not want the credit card solution because it will reduce their traffic and revenues.
I just don’t know what is the right solution.