If the Internet is a mirror of the human condition, then an examination of the image it reflects should be a matter of concern to all thinking people. Apart from the plethora of pornography sites that abound on the Web, there is an increasing number of sites run by and catering for hate groups. These groups' interests range from anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial to white supremacist, black supremacist, anti-Christian and anti-gay propaganda.
According to the Simon Wiesenthal Center, the number of such sites has more than doubled in the past year, growing from 1,400 to 3,000, with the US being the biggest growth area.
In the past, hate groups have usually sprung up in particular localities where cultural, socioeconomic and historical factors combine to germinate campaigns against specific groups.
Now, with the pervasiveness of the Internet, disparate individuals and groups can communicate internationally, using professionally crafted websites to give a veneer of credence to their philosophies. Although some people have raised the question of censorship, this has not happened to any great extent so far and will probably never happen, for several reasons.
Firstly, censorship is impossible to enforce on the Internet. The Government could pass a law prohibiting the registration of sites in the ".ie" domain that contain material likely to incite racial hatred, but such a move would not prevent Irish surfers from visiting similar sites in any other domain.
As most hate sites tend to be registered in US-controlled domains, one might be inclined to think that if the US government took action, there would be an immediate improvement. But it is not likely to happen. The hate groups themselves are quick to point to the First Amendment of the American constitution, guaranteeing freedom of speech. Under this legal umbrella, material can be published freely in the US that would be illegal in many European countries.
In August, a Paris court petitioned by French anti-racist groups ordered the US portal Yahoo! and its French-language affiliate to prevent Web surfers in France being exposed to auctions of Nazi memorabilia. The obnoxious curios on offer included empty canisters of Zyklon B, the gas used by the Nazis in the concentration camps.
Marc Knobel, a spokesman for the petitioners, told a press conference: "What we want is at least a show of goodwill from Yahoo! towards the sensitivities of other countries." While French law prohibiting the display of objects with racist overtones had meant that surfers logging on to yahoo.fr had not been subjected to the auction material, those who had logged on to yahoo.com could see the complete range of such artefacts as displayed in the US and the rest of the world.
It was this aspect of the situation that French judge Jean-Jacques Gomez was trying to address. He wanted French surfers to be unable to see the material irrespective of how they logged on.
There is no doubt that Yahoo! has some sympathy with the French point of view. Last September, Yahoo! was commended by a US Senate judiciary committee for combating racism on the Internet.
But Yahoo! founder Jerry Yang said he could not agree that one country's concerns were sufficient grounds for an Internet ban in other parts of the world. He also described as "naive" the suggestion that Yahoo! could filter access to its sites according to nationality. Most technical experts would agree that it is not possible to block access selectively and that the French request cannot be complied with.
In a separate suit, the Simon Wiesenthal Center successfully campaigned to prevent Amazon.com selling Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf to surfers in Germany, where the book is available only for academic research. The implementation of a solution was possible in this case as Amazon refuses to ship the book to any address outside America.
In general, surfers are not likely to stumble across a hate site unless they go looking for one, so it is unlikely that casual surfers will be offended. The real problem lies in the hate groups' ability to communicate with each other and organise activities using the Internet. The use of cryptography often prevents law-enforcement agencies from monitoring the groups' activities. In recent times, it has been proved that right-wing skinhead groups have used the Internet to orchestrate football violence, while, in the US, Ku Klux Klan and various militia rallies are organised through the Web as a matter of routine.
Vigilance by Internet service providers in culling sites of this nature will prove only a minor inconvenience to their creators. In the long term, if we are going to live with the Internet, we will have to accept that it reflects all aspects of humanity, - good and bad.
Fintan Gibney can be contacted at gibney@ireland.com