Senate Inq submission and links to other material on WWW

[Robert Hart]

On Sun, 10 Sep 1995, Robin Whittle wrote:

>   The Internet porn bogie man is not the giant he is purported to be. 
>   I encourage people to look for themselves, and to contextualise it 
>   with a scrutiny of newsagent's display of magazines and with a 
>   visit to a sex shop - where a far greater volume of material is 
>   freely available.

I happen to agree - and I have noticed that there is an increasing amount 
of "self imposed" access barring going on by the providers themselves.

For example, quite a number of sites require you to register and many
require this to be done by phone. These tend to be the "commercial sites"
in the main. Others allow you to register and you will receive an email 
back giving a password.

One of the reasons that people think that there is masses of porn on the 
net is that a WWW search at webcrawler or yahoo will turn up literally 
hundreds (sometimes thousands) of links. However, tracking down the hits 
reveals that an awful lot of these are simply other peple's web pages 
that contain links to the same site (frequently under a different name...)

I am not suggesting that there is no porn on the net, but I think it is 
far less than the media would have us believe...but just how much (and of 
what sort) is "too much" is a question I have truly ambivalent feelings 
about.

Interestingly, I happened upon my first "porn" links when conducting a 
search for "adult learning" - I forgot to AND the words and hence "adult" 
left me hip deep in pornography references!!!

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Robert Hart                                  hartr@hedunx.hedland.edu.au
Voice: +61 (0)91 72 0429                     Fax:   +61 (0)91 72 3560
Hedland College, PMB 1, South Hedland WA 6722 Australia