The answers my friends- are blowin’in the wind….

Glaser says in his article that “when covering online media over the past couple years, there have been times when I have felt dirty, disgusted and thoroughly dispirited about the human condition. And that was just from going through my anti-spam filter.”  He would probably be even more dismayed to know that 1% of all content on the internet is porn- that’s right folks…. An entire percentage- though I have to say that I am a bit surprised- in a way I expected it to be more.  In an article from CNN yesterday- a government study on internet porn was released – here is the link:

http://www.cnn.com/2006/TECH/internet/11/15/internet.blocking.ap/index.html

The article cuts right to the chase and starts off by saying, “About 1 percent of Web sites indexed by Google and Microsoft are sexually explicit.”The premise for the study was a revisiting of the 1998 Child Online Protection Act, which according to the article, “required commercial Web sites to collect a credit card number or other proof of age before allowing Internet users to view material deemed “harmful to minors.”Interestingly though, the U.S. Supreme Court blocked this law in 2004.  The court ruled that the law would encroach on peoples right to free speech, the court also suggested that filtering devices be used instead as a way of keeping minors out of porn sites. 

What I found so incredibly astonishing about this whole thing was that the Supreme Court will go to bat for pornographers but were this close to outlawing the VCR… Kind of like one of those things that makes you go hummm… Not to get that annoying song stuck in your head- but rulings like this definitely make me shake my head in bewilderment at the American justice system… Not that I have anything against porn mind you- but that I have everything against further rulings that might sentence future technologies to the fate that the VCR narrowly escaped. 

An even more chilling aspect of the CNN article was the mention of the over 1 million subpoenas of Google’s database… Kind of makes one wish they hadn’t been such a horn ball doesn’t it?  While Google in the end didn’t have to fulfill all 1 million of the subpoena (it cited trade secrets) they did have to comply in part.   

Recent acquisitions like the Google/You tube merger make me wonder how this is all going to play out- surely all those amateur videos will be just as much fair game as were the porn queries on Google…. It will be interesting to see just how much of a legal nightmare this purchase turns into…