In the reading Blown to Bits, the author goes into detail about the present dangers that the Internet can create.  I remember back in the late 90s to early 2000s when I would log in to AOL, and go to those Nickelodeon chat-rooms where the only questions being asked was “a/s/l”.  I did not think to myself at that age that the majority of the people in those chat-rooms were probably 40 year old men creeping around on the Internet.  Blown to Bits presented many examples of how the Internet is a powerful tool and how it is almost impossible to restrict it.  I would love to have a law in place that would stop 40 year old men from trying to contact little kids but unfortunately the Internet is too strong. In chapter 7 of Blown to Bits, it provides the example of how it is almost impossible to restrict the internet.  One of the first court cases was in 1998 when a mother and her minor son, sued AOL for harm inflicted on her son.  They alleged that AOL chat rooms were used to sell pornographic images of the boy when he was 11 years old. The Florida courts held AOL blameless saying that online service providers who knowingly allow child pornography to be marketed on their bulletin boards could not be treated as though they had published ads for kiddie porn.

Laws like DOPA have been stuck in Congress to try and combat these child predators.  The belief about laws like DOPA is that they would probably do more harm than good.  Chapter 7 also says that In requiring libraries to monitor the computer use of children using sites such as MySpace, would likely make those sites inaccessible through public libraries, while having little impact on child predators. The congressional sponsors have succumbed to a well-intentioned but misguided urge to control a social problem by restricting the technology that assists it.  It is impossible to control the Internet even if you’re trying to control it for a good cause.  The technology of the Internet is so vast that who is to say what needs to be restricted? Should it be just social network sites, chat-rooms, and other interactive websites or should they restrict search engines and torrent sites?  I like the proactive approach to try and contain child predators, but at what cost of our Internet freedom will it take to have a marginal impact.