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adult; these numbers are accepted by approximately two hundred pornographic Web sites. (It's notable that prohibiting pornography has the same effect as prohibiting drugs: the product becomes more expensive and more profitable; it would be interesting to hear the anti-pornography squad's explanation in a public debate on why this is a good thing.)

We found out in 1996 just how many countries want to keep the United States company in regulating the type of information available to their citizens via the Net. The country with one million lawyers started with legislation. Other countries are trying other tactics in what someday may be an interesting guide to national character.

On May 6, the administrators of the two largest French ISPs, FranceNet and World-Net, spent forty-eight hours in detention while police argued that as ISPs they should be held responsible for distributing child pornography despite government statements to the contrary. In protest, most French ISPs temporarily closed their Usenet service; Net users protested by turning their Web page backgrounds black, displaying French flags at half mast, and posting complaints via public news servers and electronic mail. The French Parliament, meanwhile, passed a law in June setting up a central regulatory agency to rate content.

German officials have also threatened ISPs. At the end of 1996, CompuServe subscribers worldwide were temporarily denied access to two hundred Usenet newsgroups after a Munich prosecutor warned the service that the newsgroups contained material that was illegal under German law. (In early 1997 CompuServe's German managing director, Felix Somm, was indicted on similar charges. He left the company shortly afterwards.) CompuServe blocked access to the newsgroups for all its members worldwide while it tried to figure out a mechanism to block them just for German users. CompuServe had actually found an interesting balance; while making the newsgroups available it had tried to eliminate the chance that a young user would stumble accidentally on obscene material by not giving users a full list to choose from. If you wanted alt.binaries.pictures.erotica you had to know it existed and type in its name correctly. What was surprising about the German action was that the newsgroups were mostly sexually oriented (including alt.sex.safe, which is just what it sounds like).[10] Other types of speech on the Net, such as Holocaust revisionism, are also illegal under German law. (The list of blocked newsgroups became a useful guide for those seeking pornography online, as did, to Chief Inspector Stephen French's clucking disapproval, the list of 133 newsgroups Scotland Yard's Clubs and Vice unit circulated to ISPs in August 1996.)[11]

Since then, Germany has set up a regulatory agency, the Internet Content Task Force (ICTF), and also passed new telecommunications laws requiring ISPs to build in back doors so that state officials can access users' private email if necessary for law enforcement. In early September, the ICTF ordered German ISPs to block access to the Web site at Dutch xs4all, which holds 3,100 personal and commercial home pages including those of Radikal, a left-wing political magazine that is banned in Germany. The CEO of xs4all, Felipe Rodriguez, announced that he would investigate the possibility of legal action against the German government, along with plans to rotate his site's IP number (the information behind named addresses that computers use to route network traffic) to make it more difficult to keep the site blocked. In the meantime, many sites began mirroring the Radikal pages to ensure their availability.

"This is the effect censorship has on [the] Internet: information is recreated," observed Rodriguez in a widely circulated email message to the ICTF's Michael Schneider, going on to describe technological blocks as providing only "the illusion of censorship." Presciently, earlier in the summer of 1996 both German and Australian ministers suggested that harmonized international standards are needed to prevent Net users from circumventing community standards.

Things only get worse as you move out of Europe, according to a May 10, 1996, report, "Silencing the Net,"[12] produced by the non-governmental organization Human Rights Watch. China requires all ISPs and Internet users to