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In recent years, the world has witnessed an explosive growth in areas of media and telecommunications.  The world is now moving towards economies based on information technology.  In fact, an information revolution is sweeping the whole world and affecting the cultural, social and economic sectors of different countries.

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The Internet is actually the abbreviation of the word International Network.  It is also known as World Wide Web (WWW), Super Highway or as Cyberspace.  The Internet operates like the spider’s web with many ways of getting from A to B.  It provides a standard way of gaining data and transmitting it to all parts of the world, thus linking, at the same time, individuals of any nationality to the shrinking global village.  While for many people, the Internet is the latest technical innovation in this information age, allowing one to plug and plunge into the ever-so resourceful and never-ending treasures of the net, some people conceive of it in a totally different way.  They define the Internet as “an unreal business” or a “soluble tissue of nothingness”.

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Today as the cyber space grows both in force and popularity, the need to address urgently a number of fundamental issues such as security, censorship, regulation and ownership is becoming more and more pronounced.  Many countries are finding themselves faced with a dilemma of how to cope with these issues when at the same time keeping pace with technological progress.

The first advantage of the Super Highway is that the data in it is public property.  Nobody actually is the owner of the data of the Internet.  The net is a great number of things: a fast-growing international Post Office, a library, a conference centre as well as a big database.  Indeed, the Internet provides us with a lot of facilities; search engines such as Yahoo, MSN, Google for example, come in handy to students especially, whenever they are on a project or have to do some research work.

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Newspapers, magazines and music companies, book publishing companies on their part view the online world as being both a threat and an opening to many advantages.  As a new medium, the Internet has the potential to reshape the media world, to bring in new competitors and to phase out old companies.  Already, the sales of the encyclopedia Britannica has collapsed in the face of competition.  In 1995, more than eighty thousand companies became connected to the web.

For many businesses, the cyberspace is advantageous since it provides a means of advertising and marketing.  Many of the big companies are now turning to the Internet for marketing.  The tourism industry has also moved in quickly to use both the publicity and trading opportunities available on the web.

The Internet is furthermore a source of entertainment for people of any age group.  From songs of all kinds to games like Action Man, scrabble, chess, Tom Raider to ‘chat’ the charms of the net has left no one insensitive.  In the future, people will read not only newspapers but books online; people will telecommute to work and children will be taught via the virtual world.  Much of this – as online shopping – is already possible.  Soon, it will become technically easy. 

The Super Highway is unluckily no exception to the rule: its disadvantages are worth discussing.  Indeed, it is clear that it would be futile to exercise any form of control and regulation in cyberspace because of its sheer impossibility: imagine trying to handle over fifty thousand sites constantly increasing on the internet, worldwide.

Many people are therefore disturbed by the fact that their children get access to obscene or indecent material on the web.  Many people and young adults especially children must be protected against these types of aspects.  An example is the hand-book circulating on the net, providing a recipe-like formula on how to prepare a bomb from readily available components from the market. 

Apart from the setbacks concerning control and security, another disadvantage of the internet is about the growth of the cyber-economy.  Growing businesses on the Internet network would allow many companies and individual to avoid paying taxes and governments are alarmed by the growth of a black economy which allows many companies to evade regulations.

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In fact, the drafting and enacting of appropriate laws and policy aimed at controlling the Internet and any future information super highway are becoming top priorities for different governments and policy-makers.  The USA saw the approval of the Communication Decency Act (CDA) by the US senates.  Coupled with this act is the telecom’s reform bill which will make illegal the sending of any offensive material, for example abusive letters or email which affect the security of a country or company.

Thus, one area which is worth consolidating is self-regulation.  Net-izens must be given the chance and the opportunity to prove that they can be responsible by becoming more selective on the type of information they have access to.  To facilitate parental control, filtering software has been devised that allows parents to block access to websites known to be unsuitable for young children.  Still, no one can deny that the Internet holds a high position in today’s world and that it deserves it.