ABSTRACT
Is there something essentially unpoliceable about the Internet? This question is important (and troubling) only if we have reason to believe that the Internet needs policing. To show that it does, it is not enough merely to establish that the Internet gives scope to right and wrong, good and bad, which undoubtedly it does. A natural language can be used well or badly and grammatical structures can be right or wrong; these facts alone do not support the contention that the use of natural languages needs to be policed or (pace the Académie Française) that there is any point in trying to do so. So why is it that someone might think this about the Internet? The usual answer is that the Internet is a medium for two sorts of material about which society has reason to be especially concerned – the harmful and the pornographic. To what, exactly, do these terms refer?
