Hi Deborah, ================ "AHH, and there lies the rub. Noone wants porn on the internet, but who WILL regulate the regulators." ================ That is why any regulatory body worth its salt also has to have an oversight committee whose members must NOT be part of that body. The committee can then audit the body, scrutinise it and sack any member who sets out to use his or her position outside its term of reference. Insofar as monitoring what your child sees on the net it is quite impossible unless you have something like "net nanny." Kids can hit any disgusting site inadvertently and innocently. Then, what they might see could be very disturbing. How sad that we have to resort to such things to keep evil away. Back to the old quandry of "Yin and Yang." Gary

Hi people, Gary said Insofar as Government regulators monitoring the porn and pedo sites - I'm all for it. There are a few problems with that whole idea and I will only address a couple at this time. When has a government managed anything very well? Once they start to monitor one thing then they will say they need to monitor someting else and they will create an association to it to satisfy their own needs. Pretty soon they will out and out run everything Internet related. No, not good at all. Now here is the big one, which government should this sort of a responsability be entrusted to? Porn, pedophiles, and such, certain things are more legal in some countries than in others. You can do things in Amsterdam that you cannot do in a lot of other countries. The only real country with so called freedom of speech is the USA, we don't have it in Canada, at least not like it is in the states. Allowing any one goverment to oversee anything that has to do with the Internet is asking for some serious problems. Suddenly a single government will have the power to dictate globally, oh wait we already have that don't we? But do we wnat to give that power over to anyone? I think the Internet is more like the Wild Wild West and we must govern our own actions. Power of the people is given over far to easy these days and more and more we lose what once was a given. The real problem isn't that children or anyone can end up at one of these websites quite by accident, just look at a magazine rack in any variety store, the problem is the punishment handed out by the legal system. Perhaps some harsher penalties, mess with a kid and move to the front of the line. What's at the front of the line? People that have volunteered to dispense the only justice a pedophile deserves, long and slow justice, if you catch my meaning. In reagards to how much the net would shrink if these sites were removed, I think the number would be somewhat higher than 50%.

Hi: ========================================= If you took all the pornography off the internet then it would probably shrink by about 50% ========================================= Interesting tidbit... When you do a google search, if you look at the upper right corner of the page, Google tells you how many sites are listed for that keyword. There are; 39,900,000 sites listed for the keyword: porn 214,000,000 sites listed for the keyword: sex AND.... 276,000,000 sites listed for the keyword: internet marketing If you took porn offline, it might shrink by half. But if you took all the "internet marketers" offline - the Internet would almost disappear. Heh, heh, heh.... : ) L

Hi Peter, There's a lot of sense in what you have said. I have referred to this elsewhere in the forum and I think it was Linda's idea (but the more I think of it the more it seems it was my idea - LOL!) of making all porn sites end in a suffix of dotporn (ie .porn) Then it would be clearly obvious. As it is, jackandjill.com could be anything. So could bigtedandlittleted.com. However, jackandjill.porn and bigtedandlittleted.porn is very clear. If there was a worldwide concensus on this with hefty fines for breaches of trust then that would make a difference. As for: ==================== "In reagards to how much the net would shrink if these sites were removed, I think the number would be somewhat higher than 50%." ==================== I was being conservative. Unusual huh? Gary.

Linda I agree with almost everyone here we must watch what are kids are doing. It's not going to stop it all the way if the government steps in all it will go is cause more heartaches then you can imagine.