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frequently needed for troubleshooting.[15]

Other concerns about today's blocking software are what's getting blocked and why (see chapter 15). However, the hope is that organizations with known agendas will build their own databases of blocked sites. At least one product also enables parents to block their kids from giving out certain types of personal information--a very important function in some, relatively rare circumstances, since prevention is always better than prosecution. Overall, though, while it's safe to say that the software will get better and more sophisticated, it seems unlikely that anyone is going to produce a program that can stand in for parents' involvement in their kids' use of networks.

Just as individual countries are adopting different methods for regulating the Net, so they are picking out different types of information to control. Germany criminalizes Holocaust revisionism, and dry U.S. counties might object to sites covering the details of wine production. Ireland, where abortion is constitutionally banned, spent part of the 1990s battling to restrict information about British abortion clinics. Countries where gambling is illegal might not welcome the news that New York State is setting up an off-track betting Web server. Many, many countries want to make sure that the Net doesn't bring with it new dollops of American cultural imperialism to dilute their own cultures, languages, and traditions.

Another concern is the future of anonymity in a world where posting certain types of information is criminalized. The proposals that led to the formation of the IWF include a note to "Ensure that anonymous servers (e.g.: re-mailers) that they [sic] operate in the UK record details of identity and make this available to the Police, when needed."[16] Anonymity on the Net is one area where the standards that apply in everyday physical-world life are not extended rationally-- people panic about the potential for abuse of anonymous remailers while simultaneously not questioning the existence on every street corner of devices to support anonymous interactions: mail boxes and telephone booths. It is undeniably true that the use of anonymous remailers can bypass national censorship attempts; during the Canadian criminal trials of Karla Homulka and Paul Bernado, Helsingius's remailer was used to post trial reports to an electronic mailing list accessible by Canadians denied coverage under the government-ordered media blackout.[17] It's important to remember that under our present legal system, where innocence is to be presumed, it is morally backward to argue that no one would use an anonymous remailer unless they had something to hide (an argument similar to the one made about cryptography).

We should consider learning from Ireland's history. During the decades after independence, Ireland strove to keep itself pure by banning up to two books a day; a classic Irish Senate debate on censorship in 1943 was likened by Irish writer Frank O'Connor to a "long, slow swim through a sewage bed."[18] The worst economic effects of the many bans were felt by Irish writers and the domestic publishing industry, a point that should be considered by American legislators seeking to control what material may be posted on the networks--especially since it is estimated that more than 50 percent of U.S. exports are intellectual property, the kind suited for transmission via the Net.[19] Structures designed to impede the flow of one type of information are likely to impede others by slowing down transmission while the material's legality is being checked, by raising fears of litigation or search and seizure that make people reluctant to use the Net, or by burdening users with added costs. Would you use a telephone that only transmitted certain words and kept user logs?

Or, as University of Miami associate law professor A. Michael Froomkin puts it,

Almost every attempt to block access to material on the Internet, indeed anything short of an extraordinarily restrictive access policy, can be circumvented easily. Hydras can be killed by heroic measures: according to Greek mythology, Hercules