The Internet: A Clear And Present Danger

Does Internet Really Need Regulations?

The article "The Internet: A Clear and Present Danger?" written by Cathleen Cleaver is a clear claim of the necessity of government regulation to control what is being shown on the Internet. To support her claim, Cleaver gives the pornographic web sites as an example. She argues that the regulations used to control the selling of pornography applied to porn stores, magazines, and television should also be applied to the Internet. The reason for such necessity is that it is impossible to control who is actually accessing such web sites. Following this reason, Cleaver's main claim in the article is that children can access pornographic web sites on the Internet. This claim is clearly stated by Cleaver in the fourth paragraph of her essay: "When considering what is in the public interest, we must consider the whole public, including children, as individual participants in this new medium" (460). After that her following paragraphs give examples and explanations that support the necessity of a government regulation on Internet. Such examples and explanations were very effective in order to support her claim. They made a fundamental relationship between the author's claim and the real facts that support it, helping people realize such danger by thinking about their own experience.

The article starts with several examples of what can actually happen to Internet users when somebody gets free access to private information in their computers and also how unprotected children are when using free Internet programs. Those examples are crucial for the readers' understanding of the importance of a regulation in dealing with web sites, and they leave an opening for the subject to be exposed by the writer.

In fact, children's free access to pornographic web sites and the lack of protection offered in chatting web sites are realities that the society as whole should care a lot about. Both subjects are very well supported by Cleaver. The example showed at the beginning of the writing where a pedophile e-mails somebody's son and later on arranges to meet the child after school is, first of all, a good warning for the parents. This was not only an example, this was a reality showed by Cleaver, something that actually happens. The free access provided by chatting web sites leads to a lack of parental control. Therefore, parents are unable to control such danger and protect their children, unless they are aware about the Internet programs, just like the parents in the example. The other major problem showed by Cleaver was what kind of children the pornographic web sites are building for the future. Her worry about this is stated in the eleventh paragraph: "We have got to start considering what kind of society we will have when the next generation learns about human sexuality from what the Internet teaches" (Cleaver 461). That is another important fact that most people haven't realized yet. The scenes usually shown in such sites are of extreme violence and most of them celebrate unhealthy and antisocial kinds of sexual activities, such as sadomasochism, abuse, and degradation. Of course, those are not subjects that children should be dealing with, but, because web sites like these are freely available without restriction on the Internet, children