Response to Catherine

                I do not think that the government should have any control over what is said on the internet, but organizations that own the websites do. Any website that allows comments has the right to remove comment that they deem inappropriate. People do have a right to express themselves, but there is a time and a place, even on the internet. Facebook, to use an example you mentioned, has a right to remove certain content that is discriminatory or hateful towards others. By using the site you are allowing them that control which I’m sure is something they include in their policy agreement. The government should not have any control over content on any site that is not owned and operated by the government. If the government controlled the internet, they would be able to limit information that calls themselves or their policies into question and people need to be able to question the government. Even if information on the internet were put through a filter, that filter would either miss many of the sites that were intended to be censored for whatever content is deemed appropriate, or it would take out many sites that were perfectly appropriate but used some word that could be taken as vulgar or discriminatory. Say the government banned sexually explicit sites and sites about sexually transmitted diseases were taken out because the language is the same. This seems likely because the internet is so huge that it would take a machine to censor all the information, but the machine would have to recognize the information somehow. Keywords would be one simple way to do so. If they had people check sites and censor the internet they could not get much done because it is so expansive. It seems to me that if the government were to censor the internet it would be done much the same way as it is with television. This would mean the targets for censorship would be discriminatory works, but they would also be sexual and vulgar sites. Since the internet is not specified in the first amendment, the same way that television is not, once the government got a start censoring they could potentially expand. Right now books are not censored, but television is with reasons cited such as its invading the privacy of the home. Kids could accidentally see it without the parents having actually brought the material home as you have to do when purchasing a novel. The same is true with the internet. I think any censorship of the internet by the government is a slippery slope to eroding important aspects of freedom of speech and information.

                Do you think that sites like Google or Yahoo should have the ability to remove sites from their searches because of content that does not meet their standards?