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says, "less than 50 percent of the sample ever accessed a sexually oriented newsgroup, and only 20 percent accessed a sexually oriented newsgroup three or more times." Similar stories used to be told of the early days of satellite TV.

None of that changes the perception that the Net is really a sewer at heart or that children are put at risk when they're allowed out to play with geeks bearing .GIFs [15], even though many of them face much worse from real life in the form of abuse, neglect, and poverty than they do from the worst images the Net has to offer.

But what is pornography, anyway? You may know it when you see it, but can you find twelve people to agree with you? In the wake of the tabloid attack on CIX, people got cautious. One friend worriedly reported to the management, for example, a cartoon-style picture he'd found on the system of a small, pastel- colored stallion doing to My Little Pony what a generation of unsentimental parents would probably have liked to do themselves. Is that pornography? I'd call it hostile-parent humor. Similarly, I'm not really sure what people talk about in alt.sex. bestiality.barney, but surely that purple thug must deserve it. Or how would you classify Heartless's Holey Haven's explicit and alienated tips on when it's not worth the trouble to give a blow job? We also need to consider the difference between consumption of pornography--browsing pictures on Web sites, downloading video clips--and the mutually consensual interactive fantasy sessions that take place in real time.

Is society as a whole well served by the prohibition on sexually explicit material? Just as personal computers put the means to produce respectably elegant publications on all sorts of desks, and the Internet has given a worldwide platform to those who could never have afforded to buy their own radio or TV station, today's technology means that pornography does not have to be the sole production of a small band of men who make millions out of its forbidden aura. Does it make sense to pursue those who post sexual material to online public areas for no financial return while leaving alone the commercial producers and distributors of films, videotapes, and magazines? This is an area where the existence of the Net can change the debate.

But the perception is that these other media are controlled, that a child attempting to take a copy of Fanny Hill out of the library or buy a copy of Bestiality Monthly would have to get past a gatekeeping adult, while on the Net anything can happen. One of the sillier tabloid newspaper articles of 1994 attacked the BBC Networking Club for selling access to pornography.[16] Its manager, Julian Ellison, after pointing out that the Club had cut sex-related newsgroups out of its newsfeed, said, "It seems to me that this obsession with pornography is found among those who have never used the Internet," adding that even though it's easier to access pornography through a public library or newsstand, "the combined sensationalism of porn and technology strikes fear into people."

The fact is that because the Internet is vast and the systems for measuring it poor (see chapter 12), we may never be able to gauge accurately how much pornography is out there, any more than we know offhand how many of our neighbors have vibrators in their nightstands. But granted that parents have a right to be concerned about what their kids see, and that people in general have a right not to be barraged with material they find offensive, the question more usefully might be what kinds of systems to put in place to enable those things.

The first answer is that in general the Net organizes itself rather well. People who are paying in time, even if not phone and access charges, really don't appreciate logging into a newsgroup called rec.sport.tennis or soc.feminism and finding photographs from Hustler, any more than the alt.binaries.pictures.erotica p e o p l e want pictures of Mickey Mouse shoved in front of their noses. Such postings generally attract flames and, if the user is persistent, complaints to the news.admin.net-abuse.* hierarchy, followed by the attention of one of those Net-approved cancelers. The invasion of newsgroups like rec.pets.cats aside, there isn't (so far, anyway) a gang of Net users who think that areas likely to attract children should be invaded with explicit material. Many Netizens are parents, too.