...The internet is available at a very minimal cost which makes the access to information and freedom of speech available at the same minimal cost. The information that is published over the internet can be accessed globally. The internet is available to anyone with a computer and access to the internet. Anything from fixing a car to building a bomb, from pictures of family to pictures of little children performing unspeakable sexual acts can be posted on the internet. All you have to do to access anything on the web is to just click on your web browser and type in the web address or type in a keyword on a search engine and you will be automatically linked to sites that pertain to your search.
The internet is unlike any other form of publishing. It allows you to publish anything you chose quickly and quietly. The cost involved to publish your thoughts and opinions, or to access other people's thoughts and opinions is the price of a computer, a modem – which already comes installed in most computers today, and the low monthly cost of internet service through your internet service provider. If you wanted to publish your thoughts and opinions in a daily newspaper for example, it will cost you millions upon millions of dollars to start up this newspaper which may only reach thousands of people. If you can afford as little as one thousand dollars for a personal computer and twenty or thirty dollars a month for internet service, you can publish your thoughts and opinions on the internet and have them reach billions of people for a small fraction of the cost to publish the same information in a daily newspaper.
A web page can be set up so that it is unavailable to anyone who does not know the address. This allows for the publishing of things such as child pornography and instructions for making a bomb available without anyone knowing about it. If these things were published from your computer in this way, you wouldn't even know about it. On the other hand, some of this information is published on sites that anyone can access without knowing the web address. Links can be set up to bring people to web pages that they don't want to see and can subject them to immoral images and text. Children can use the web to find pictures and text about subjects that are not suitable for their viewing by just typing one wrong word into a search engine.
The problem that concerns most people about the internet is the offensive material that is available on the internet, such as pornography. Since the internet is open to everyone, children are very easily exposed to such immoral and offensive material. The main reason that societies seek to restrict access to information is for this reason as well as the fact that not all societies agree with the same topics or have the same views as the next...

Essay Empire