For the longest time, the Children’s Online Protection Act, signed off by President Clinton way back in 1998, has been a contentious issue in the US. It was originally kicked out of town, well Philadelphia anyway, after a federal district court banned the enforcement of the law, and a federal appeals court agreed, as did the Supreme Court in June 2005 when the ban was upheld. However, the Supreme Court did send it back to district court as part of a fact finding mission concentrating on the effectiveness of Internet filtering.
Which is where my attention gets grabbed, as someone who not only has a book published about sex on the Internet over a decade ago now, but regularly writes about the subject for various adult publications. You see, I had always been under the impression that online sex was one of the main drivers of not only Internet popularity, but technological advance itself. The latter conviction has not been diminished by the evidence given to the federal court hearing in Philadelphia, but I must admit that my belief in just how prevalent sexually explicit material within web pages was, has been.